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Effective responses to climate change may demand a radical shift in human lifestyles away from self-interest for material gain, towards self-restraint for the public good. The challenge then lies in sustaining cooperative mitigation against the temptation to free-ride on others' contributions, which can undermine public endeavours. When all possible future scenarios entail costs, however, the rationale for contributing to a public good changes from altruistic sacrifice of personal profit to necessary investment in minimizing personal debt. Here we demonstrate analytically how an economic framework of costly adaptation to climate change can sustain cooperative mitigation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We develop game-theoretic scenarios from existing examples of insurance for adaptation to natural hazards exacerbated by climate-change that bring the debt burden from future climate events into the present. We model the as-yet untried potential for leveraging public contributions to mitigation from personal costs of adaptation insurance, by discounting the insurance premium in proportion to progress towards a mitigation target. We show that collective mitigation targets are feasible for individuals as well as nations, provided that the premium for adaptation insurance in the event of no mitigation is at least four times larger than the mitigation target per player. This prediction is robust to players having unequal vulnerabilities, wealth, and abilities to pay. We enumerate the effects of these inequalities on payoffs to players under various sub-optimal conditions. We conclude that progress in mitigation is hindered by its current association with a social dilemma, which disappears upon confronting the bleak consequences of inaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use behavioral and experimental economics to study a particular aspect of the economics of climate change: the potential trade-off between countries'' investments in mitigation versus adaptation. While mitigation of greenhouse gases can be viewed as a public good, adaptation to climate change is a private good, benefiting only the country or the individual that invests in adaptation. We use a one-shot public-goods game that deviates from the standard public-goods game by introducing a stochastic term to account for probabilistic destruction in a climate-change setting, where the probability density function is mapped to within-group levels of mitigation. We compare low-vulnerability and high-vulnerability treatments by varying the magnitude of disaster across treatments. Our results show that there is no significant difference in the level of mitigation across these treatments. Further, our results emphasize the role of trust in enhancing cooperation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Economic theory has invoked moral motivation as an explanation for the voluntary provision of public goods but is vague with regard to the specific moral concerns involved. Focusing on climate change as a case study, this paper relates morally-motivated public good provision to the six moral foundations (MFs) identified by moral psychologists: Care, Fairness and Liberty (individual-focused), and Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity (group-focused). Using data from the European Social Surveys it is found that using the MFs in addition to standard explanatory variables improves the explanation of climate-friendly behaviors and endorsement of climate-friendly regulations. While the Fairness and Care foundations are strong and robust predictors of the dependent variables, the Loyalty foundation contributes positively only when neglecting the nature of climate change mitigation as a global public good. More generally, in contrast to the individual-focused MFs (that apply to all individuals), the group-focused MFs are of little direct relevance to climate change mitigation – consistent with the benefit from mitigation extending beyond the in-group (family, neighborhood, region, or nation) to which these MFs refer. Group-focused MFs are only of indirect relevance as their endorsement fosters general environmental concern. • Voluntary public good provision is frequently explained by moral motivation, • Moral psychologists have identified six fundamental moral concerns potentially relevant to public good provision. • Using the six moral foundations (MFs) improves the explanation of climate-friendly behaviors. • Individual-focused (universalist) MFs, not group-focused MFs, are positively related to climate-friendly behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate change policies. To fulfill this promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to this specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions behavior in public goods games generalizes to decisions about voluntary climate actions. We observe each participant in two different decision tasks: a real giving task in which contributions are used to directly reduce CO 2 emissions and an abstract public goods game. Through treatment variations in this within-subjects design, we explore two factors that are candidates for affecting generalizability: the structural resemblance of contribution incentives between the tasks and the role of the subject pool, students and non-students. Our findings suggest that cooperation in public goods games is only weakly linked to voluntary climate actions and not in a uniform way. For a standard set of parameters, behavior in both tasks is uncorrelated. Greater structural resemblance of the public goods game with the context of climate change mitigation produces more sizable correlations, especially for student subjects. • We analyze under which conditions behavior in public good games generalizes to mitigation choices. • Drawing on observation from two samples (non-student and student) and varying parameters in the PGG • Cooperation in public good games is linked to voluntary mitigation behavior, albeit not uniformly. • For a standard set of parameters, behavior in both tasks is uncorrelated. • Greater structural resemblance of the public goods game to climate change mitigation increases generalizability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]