Title

Modeling International Climate Change Negotiations More Responsibly: Can Highly Simplified Game Theory Models Provide Reliable Policy Insights?

Keywords

Climate change; Conflict resolution; Game theory; Non-cooperative; Policy

Abstract

In a recent article in this journal entitled "Game Theory and Climate Diplomacy", DeCanio and Fremstad (2013)provide an interesting treatment of a range of simple game theoretic characterizations of international climatenegotiations. The authors use the Nash and Maxi-min stability definitions to analyze 25 two-by-two ordinalgames, which they recognize as "possible game-theoretic characterizations of climate negotiations betweentwo players (e.g., Great Powers or coalitions of states)". The authors' main conclusion that the Prisoner's Dilemmamight not be the best description of climate negotiations game is consistent with the findings of otherswho have studied two-by-two conflicts over natural commons (Bardhan, 1993; Madani, 2010; Sandler, 1992;Taylor, 1987). Nevertheless, given the importance of the climate change issue, as well as the potential effects ofour actions on the state of the environment and the well-being of future generations, I would like to addresssome gaps in their analysis, which result in it having limited usefulness for policy purposes. Of course, allmodels are simplified representations of reality, full of limitations. "Essentially, all models are wrong, butsome are useful" (Box and Draper, 1987). So, "the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to notbe useful" (Box and Draper, 1987). Models' limitations need to be carefully considered when interpretingthem or applying their results to policy but some models are too simple to provide useful policy advice. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

Publication Date

6-1-2013

Publication Title

Ecological Economics

Volume

90

Number of Pages

68-76

Document Type

Note

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2013.02.011

Socpus ID

84875850888 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84875850888

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