Accountability for future generations

Intergenerational sustainability (IS) is compromised because the current generation affects future generations, but the opposite is not true. This one-way nature tends to prevent the current generation from communicating with and taking accountability for their actions to future generations. While communication is known to mitigate some problems between parties, little is known about how intergenerational communication resolves some problems between the current and future generations. This research addresses how accountability among generations as a communication device promotes IS, hypothesizing that being accountable for future generations positively influences individuals in the current generation to take sustainable actions. We institute online intergenerational goods game (IGG) experiments via oTree with Python programming with two treatments, following Hauser et al. (2014) and Chen et al. (2016). In baseline IGG treatment, we prepare a sequence of generations, each consists of five individuals, and they are asked to choose their individual harvests where the resource is exhausted when the individual harvests’ sum in the current generation exceeds some threshold, otherwise, the resource is replenished for the next generation. In intergenerational accountability (IA) treatment, individuals are additionally asked to be accountable by explaining the reasons of their harvest decisions and advice for future, passing the account to the next generation. We find that IA induces individuals to choose their harvests for being both intragenerationally and intergenerationally fair as well as for being intergenerationally sustainable.