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Intra- and intergenerational discounting in the climate game

Nature Climate Change 3, 1025–1028 (2013) | Download Citation

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Abstract

The difficulty of avoiding dangerous climate change arises from a tension between group and self-interest1,2,3 and is exacerbated by climate change’s intergenerational nature4. The present generation bears the costs of cooperation, whereas future generations accrue the benefits if present cooperation succeeds, or suffer if present cooperation fails. Although temporal discounting has long been known to matter in making individual choices5, the extent of temporal discounting is poorly understood in a group setting. We represent the effect of both intra- and intergenerational discounting4,6,7 through a collective-risk group experiment framed around climate change. Participants could choose to cooperate or to risk losing an additional endowment with a high probability. The rewards of defection were immediate, whereas the rewards of cooperation were delayed by one day, delayed by seven weeks (intragenerational discounting), or delayed by several decades and spread over a much larger number of potential beneficiaries (intergenerational discounting). We find that intergenerational discounting leads to a marked decrease in cooperation; all groups failed to reach the collective target. Intragenerational discounting was weaker by comparison. Our results experimentally confirm that international negotiations to mitigate climate change are unlikely to succeed if individual countries’ short-term gains can arise only from defection.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the students from the University of Hamburg for participation, the students at the University of British Columbia for participation in pilot experiments, T. Burmester, S. Dobler, R. Reilly for their help and the Max-Planck-Society and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for financial support.

Author information

Affiliations

  1. Environmental Studies, New York University, 285 Mercer Street, New York 10003, USA

    • Jennifer Jacquet

  2. Department of Evolutionary Ecology, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology, August-Thienemann-Strasse 2, D-24306 Plön, Germany

    • Kristin Hagel
    •  & Manfred Milinski

  3. Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, 1984 Mathematics Road, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2, Canada

    • Christoph Hauert

  4. Department ‘The Ocean in the Earth System’, Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, Bundesstrasse 53, 20146 Hamburg, Germany

    • Jochem Marotzke

  5. Research Group Evolutionary Theory, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology, August-Thienemann-Strasse 2, D-24306 Plön, Germany

    • Torsten Röhl

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Contributions

J.J., C.H. and M.M. designed the experiment; K.H. and M.M. carried out the experiments; T.R. wrote the software for performing the experiment; J.J., K.H. and T.R. prepared the data and statistics; all authors wrote the paper, prepared the figures, and reviewed the paper and results.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jennifer Jacquet.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2024

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