Reciprocal Climate Negotiators

32 Pages Posted: 7 Mar 2015

See all articles by Karine Nyborg

Karine Nyborg

University of Oslo - Department of Economics; IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Abstract

International climate negotiations have been troubled by mutual mistrust. At the same time, a hope seems to prevail that once enough countries moved forward, others would follow suit. If the abatement game faced by climate negotiators is a Prisoners' Dilemma, and countries are narrowly self-interested, such a hope seems unfounded. However, if countries display reciprocity – a preference to repay meanness by meanness and kindness by kindness – their willingness to abate will be conditional on others' abatement. I show that a full or majority coalition can be stable. This requires, however, that a majority of countries have relatively strong reciprocity preferences. No coalition participation is always stable. In addition, a stable minority coalition may exist; if so, it is weakly larger than the maximum stable coalition with standard preferences, but is characterized by mutually negative sentiments.

Keywords: international environmental agreements, reciprocity, coalitions

JEL Classification: F53, H87, Q54

Suggested Citation

Nyborg, Karine, Reciprocal Climate Negotiators. IZA Discussion Paper No. 8866, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2575046 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2575046

Karine Nyborg (Contact Author)

University of Oslo - Department of Economics ( email )

P.O.Box 1095 Blindern
Oslo, N-0317
Norway

HOME PAGE: http://folk.uio.no/karineny/

IZA Institute of Labor Economics ( email )

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

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