Game Theory and the Politics of Global Warming: the State of Play and Beyond
This academic journal considers the implications of treating the global climate change crisis, and the political maneuvering that revolves around it, as a collective-action game that falls under Game Theory. In terms of accountability, democracy and elections, and the favorability and viability of cooperation over unilateral action, one of the most significant indicators that collective action failure will occur is characterized by the tragedy of the commons, in which open access to and abundance of a resource, namely the environment, leads to the overextension of that resource by the participants in the collective action game, i.e. the International community. This occurs partially as a result of the anarchic nature of the systems of sovereignty that govern modern international relations, and partially due to a lack of consequences, and abundance of short-term benefits for defecting from participation in collective action.
The key element of the challenge of the game that climate change represents is its temporal factor: The short-term costs dissuade from the long-term benefits, skewing favorability of strategies for relevant actors/players (i.e. politicians and heads of state) away from successful collective action, and toward external goals and benefits, such economic gain or re-election. Additionally, because climate change is an ongoing process, as is politics, the article characterizes the larger game as a “super-game”, made up of a series of one-shot games in succession, representative of individual political choices or actions and their favorability toward a successful collective action outcome. This view is relevant to the concept of strategy optimization discussed in class, as much of the danger of failure to achieve collective action to solve climate change is characterized as players optimizing their strategies toward success in each individual one-shot game as a result of political short-term incentives, rather than acting according to the win conditions of the larger super-game.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1996.tb00338.x