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Global Warming & the Way to Win Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemmas

Despite a multitude of sources espousing anthropogenic climate change and a near-universal consensus on the severity of humanity’s industrialization on the environment, there has been a surprising amount of traction in getting large-scale agreements in place to mitigate our future damages. On the surface, the cause of this recalcitrance is relatively obvious and can be easily modeled in a prisoner’s dilemma situation. No country wants to be the only one to curb its emissions; if everyone else ignores the agreement and your country is the only one to adhere to it, suddenly your country falls behind. Every country’s best-case scenario in this agreement is to be a “free rider,” a country that doesn’t obey the agreement but still manages to reap its rewards. So while it is mutually beneficial for all participating countries to curb their emissions, the self-interest and self-preservation that governs a country causes each country to avoid being the first to do so.

However, one glaring oversight in this argument is that players in a prisoner’s dilemma game will act differently if the game is played repeatedly, rather than once. In the 1980s, a study conducted by Robert Axelrod aimed to find the most successful strategy when players were placed through repeated prisoner’s dilemmas, with full knowledge of how the other players acted in previous iterations. The most successful strategy was what was simply called “tit-for-tat.” In this strategy, player A was to cooperate in the first iteration regardless of the other player. Afterwards, if the other player defected, then player A was also to defect as well. Once the other player began to cooperate, then player A would also begin to cooperate. In the words of Steven Strogatz, player A should “be nice, be provocable, and be forgiving.” Translated, “nice” is to cooperate initially, “provocable” is to defect in retaliation to the other player’s defection and continue doing so, and “forgiving” is to immediately begin to cooperate once the other player cooperates regardless of their past actions. The result that Axelrod achieved, after many iterations of prisoner’s dilemmas using this “tit-for-tat” strategy, was one of sustained cooperation, where no player deems it better to defect (or else everyone else would punish the person for doing so).

Thus, the counterargument can be made for the pessimistic vision initially presented. Applying the results of Axelrod’s experiments, the eventual result of these international climate change compromises is sustained cooperation. Of course, there would be some nudging of defectors to begin cooperating; Michael Liebreich, from the research firm New Energy Finance, argues for harsher sanctions on countries that currently do not adhere to present agreements. Treaties should also be revised more frequently; if improvements begin to show following multiple iterations, the iterations should be shorter rather than longer. Shorter periods between agreement renewals and revisions allows for quicker punishment and reeling in of “free rider” countries. The goal of these agreements should not necessarily be to create a system that everyone agrees on, but to create one that presses stubborn participants to concede and cooperate.

http://www.businessinsider.com/steven-strogatz-interview-on-math-education-2016-6

http://www.economist.com/node/9867020

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