Climate policy commitment devices

Sebastian Dengler, Reyer Gerlagh, Stefan T. Trautmann, Gijs van de Kuilen
2018 Journal of Environmental Economics and Management  
We develop a dynamic resource extraction game that mimics the global multi-generation planning problem for climate change and fossil fuel extraction. We implement the game under different conditions in the laboratory. Compared to a 'libertarian' baseline condition, we find that policy interventions that provide a costly commitment device or reduce climate threshold uncertainty reduce resource extraction. We also study two conditions to assess the underlying social preferences and the viability
more » ... f ecological dictatorship. Our results suggest that climate-change policies that focus on investments that lock the economy into carbonfree energy sources provide an important commitment device in the intertemporal cooperation problem.
doi:10.1016/j.jeem.2018.10.004 fatcat:xjh64mc65jb3hbwxn4s6eqxzrq