"Sanctions and international interaction improve cooperation to avert climate change“

Heike Hennig-Schmidt (Bonn university Germany and Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia) gave a presentation on "Sanctions and international interaction improve cooperation to avert climate change“ at the 6th Maastricht Behavioral Economic Policy Symposium. Coauthors are Gianluca Grimalda (Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Germany), Alexis Belianin (Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia), Till Requate (University of Kiel, Germany), Marina V. Ryzhkova (Tomsk State University, Russia).

 Abstract

Imposing sanctions on noncompliant parties to international agreements is often advocated as a remedy for international cooperation failure, notably in climate agreements. We provide an experimental test of this conjecture in a collective-risk social dilemma simulating the effort to avoid catastrophic climate change. As in previous studies, German participants’ cooperation is higher than Russian participants’ cooperation when groups interact nationally and sanctioning is available. However, in international interaction Russian cooperation increases significantly in comparison with national cooperation and converges to German participants’ cooperation. While the increase is only marginally significant without sanctions, it becomes considerable when sanctions are imposed, even if sanctions reduce final payoffs. Our study supports the idea that international interaction supported by sanctions is beneficial for cooperation in situations of collective risk.