Alistair Ulph, University of Manchester: International Environmental Agreements with Kantian Moral Behavior

Zoom-Meeting link:
https://zoom.us/j/92159271768?pwd=eVo5by92QnVEcnkrSTh2blk2QTFVUT09

Meeting-ID: 921 5927 1768
Kenncode: p5E93t
    

Abstract
In this paper we study the non-cooperative formation of international environmental agreements (IEAs) when agents act in an imperfect Kantian fashion, whereby their objective function is a weighted average of the homo oeconomicus objective that underpins the standard literature on IEA formation and the homo Kantiensis objective function under which agents take the action that would be best if everyone else took the same action. We examine what happens when agents act in an imperfectly Kantian fashion: (i) just with respect to their emission decisions; (ii) just with respect to their membership decisions. We show that in the first case the game is isomorphic to the standard game where agents act as homo oeconomicus, and so yields the same pessimistic membership results as the conventional model of IEAs. However, when agents act as imperfect Kantians with respect to membership, we show, in widely-studied special cases, that it is always possible to achieve the grand coalition when the weight on Kantian behaviour exceeds a lower bound which is never greater than 0.5, is increasing in the number of countries and, either constant or decreasing in the severity of damage costs.