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International Environmental Cooperation: A New Eye on the Greenhouse Gases Emissions’ Control

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  • Mélanie Heugues

Abstract

We examine the formation of International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) modelled as a two-stage non cooperative game. Following Barrett (1994), Finus (2001) and Diamantoudi & al. (2006) and filling out their approach, we analyse the level of cooperation that can be reach when countries’ strategies are complementary. We find that when strategies exhibit weak complementarities, the unique stable agreement can consist of half the countries involved in the negotiation and thus, without any form of commitment, linkage or transfers between countries. These results, established analytically, strongly contrast with those of the previous authors and are a lot more optimistic. Nonetheless, even if the incentives to free-ride are less strong, we do not observe the formation of the “grand” coalition: not all the countries sign the agreement. We also provide some results of comparative static. We analyse, for example, the level of cooperation which only depends on the number of countries concerned with the problem of climate change and on the perception they have of its seriousness.

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  • Mélanie Heugues, 2009. "International Environmental Cooperation: A New Eye on the Greenhouse Gases Emissions’ Control," Working Papers 09-04, LAMETA, Universtiy of Montpellier, revised Mar 2009.
  • Handle: RePEc:lam:wpaper:09-04
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    Cited by:

    1. Valentina Bosetti & Melanie Heugues & Alessandro Tavoni, 2017. "Luring others into climate action: coalition formation games with threshold and spillover effects," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 69(2), pages 410-431.
    2. Vyacheslav Kalashnikov & Vladimir Bulavsky & Vitaliy Kalashnikov & Nataliya Kalashnykova, 2014. "Structure of demand and consistent conjectural variations equilibrium (CCVE) in a mixed oligopoly model," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 217(1), pages 281-297, June.
    3. Chenhao Fang & Tieju Ma, 2021. "Technology adoption with carbon emission trading mechanism: modeling with heterogeneous agents and uncertain carbon price," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 300(2), pages 577-600, May.
    4. Mélanie Heugues, 2013. "The Global Emission Game: On the Impact of Strategic Interactions Between Countries on the Existence and the Properties of Nash Equilibria," Working Papers 2013.108, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    5. Achim Hagen & Pierre von Mouche & Hans-Peter Weikard, 2020. "The Two-Stage Game Approach to Coalition Formation: Where We Stand and Ways to Go," Games, MDPI, vol. 11(1), pages 1-31, January.
    6. Tajbakhsh, Alireza & Hassini, Elkafi, 2022. "A game-theoretic approach for pollution control initiatives," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 254(C).
    7. Leonhard Kähler & Klaus Eisenack, 2016. "Strategic Complements in International Environmental Agreements: a New Island of Stability," Working Papers V-393-16, University of Oldenburg, Department of Economics, revised Aug 2016.

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