International Environmental Agreements have demonstrated extremely hard to achieve and resist the curse of free-riding over time. Even after the Paris Agreement, the most important milestone reached by the Conference Of Parties in recent years, the risk of unilateral withdrawals may prevent cooperation on joint policy actions. Several studies have been searching for self-enforcing strategies to enlarge cooperation and enforce agreement stability, supported by models grounded on game theory. However, the public-good nature of climate change makes it an exceptionally complex problem with many time-varying international issues which are hard to be all accounted for in any game-theoretical framework. Here we propose an Agent-Based negotiating framework to reproduce and investigate International Agreements on greenhouse gases emissions regulation. The simulation model follows a bottom-up approach, starting from a modelled behaviour for each region-representative negotiator. Few interaction rules, shared as common knowledge, regulate the debate and guarantee termination and convergence to an agreement, although not imposing any minimum participation commitment. Agents generate and update their own emissions mitigation proposals following private multi-objective evaluations over potential upcoming scenarios (estimated by the coupled RICE50+ Integrated Assessment Model), reactions to other players' proposals, and confidential negotiating strategies. Results show the participatory consequences of different personal multi-objective evaluations, as expected co-benefits may foster individual commitment and higher satisfaction from the agreement achieved. The emerging behaviours of the model dynamics help to point out the most influential conditions and levers for international cooperation.

An agent-based negotiating framework for international climate agreements

P. Gazzotti;A. Castelletti;M. Tavoni
2021-01-01

Abstract

International Environmental Agreements have demonstrated extremely hard to achieve and resist the curse of free-riding over time. Even after the Paris Agreement, the most important milestone reached by the Conference Of Parties in recent years, the risk of unilateral withdrawals may prevent cooperation on joint policy actions. Several studies have been searching for self-enforcing strategies to enlarge cooperation and enforce agreement stability, supported by models grounded on game theory. However, the public-good nature of climate change makes it an exceptionally complex problem with many time-varying international issues which are hard to be all accounted for in any game-theoretical framework. Here we propose an Agent-Based negotiating framework to reproduce and investigate International Agreements on greenhouse gases emissions regulation. The simulation model follows a bottom-up approach, starting from a modelled behaviour for each region-representative negotiator. Few interaction rules, shared as common knowledge, regulate the debate and guarantee termination and convergence to an agreement, although not imposing any minimum participation commitment. Agents generate and update their own emissions mitigation proposals following private multi-objective evaluations over potential upcoming scenarios (estimated by the coupled RICE50+ Integrated Assessment Model), reactions to other players' proposals, and confidential negotiating strategies. Results show the participatory consequences of different personal multi-objective evaluations, as expected co-benefits may foster individual commitment and higher satisfaction from the agreement achieved. The emerging behaviours of the model dynamics help to point out the most influential conditions and levers for international cooperation.
2021
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11311/1200511
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