Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Intra- and intergenerational discounting in the climate game

Nature Climate Change volume 3, pages 1025–1028 (2013)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

The difficulty of avoiding dangerous climate change arises from a tension between group and self-interest1,2,3 and is exacerbated by climate change’s intergenerational nature4. The present generation bears the costs of cooperation, whereas future generations accrue the benefits if present cooperation succeeds, or suffer if present cooperation fails. Although temporal discounting has long been known to matter in making individual choices5, the extent of temporal discounting is poorly understood in a group setting. We represent the effect of both intra- and intergenerational discounting4,6,7 through a collective-risk group experiment framed around climate change. Participants could choose to cooperate or to risk losing an additional endowment with a high probability. The rewards of defection were immediate, whereas the rewards of cooperation were delayed by one day, delayed by seven weeks (intragenerational discounting), or delayed by several decades and spread over a much larger number of potential beneficiaries (intergenerational discounting). We find that intergenerational discounting leads to a marked decrease in cooperation; all groups failed to reach the collective target. Intragenerational discounting was weaker by comparison. Our results experimentally confirm that international negotiations to mitigate climate change are unlikely to succeed if individual countries’ short-term gains can arise only from defection.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Group investments by treatment.
Figure 2: Average group investment and standard error of the mean (coloured range) by treatment over the 10 rounds.
Figure 3: The average number of selfish (providing €0), fair-share (providing €2) and altruistic (providing €4) investments per group of 6 players over the 10 rounds by treatment.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Hardin, G. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162, 1243–1248 (1968).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Dawes, R. M. Social dilemmas. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 31, 169–193 (1980).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Hauert, C., Michor, F., Nowak, M. & Doebeli, M. Synergy and discounting of cooperation in social dilemmas. J. Theor. Biol. 239, 195–202 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Schelling, T. C. Intergenerational discounting. Energy Policy 23, 395–401 (1995).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Clark, C. The economics of overexploitation. Science 181, 630–634 (1973).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Sumaila, R. & Walters, C. Intergenerational discounting: A new intuitive approach. Ecol. Econom. 52, 135–142 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Beckerman, W. & Hepburn, C. Ethics of the discount rate in the Stern review on the economics of climate change. World Econom. 8, 187–210 (2007).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Schneider, S. H. What is ‘dangerous’ climate change? Nature 411, 17–19 (2001).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Meinshausen, M. et al. Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C. Nature 458, 1158–1162 (2009).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Peters, G.P. et al. The challenge to keep global warming below 2 °C. Nature Clim. Change 3, 4–6 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Roeckner, E., Giorgetta, M. A., Crueger, T., Esch, M. & Pongratz, J. Historical and future anthropogenic emission pathways derived from coupled climate-carbon cycle simulations. Climatic Change 105, 91–108 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Fehr, E. & Gächter, S. Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature 415, 137–140 (2002).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  13. Gächter, S., Renner, E. & Sefton, M. The long-run benefits of punishment. Science 322, 1510 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Milinski, M., Semmann, D. & Krambeck, H. J. Reputation helps solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Nature 415, 424–426 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Rockenbach, B. & Milinski, M. The efficient interaction of indirect reciprocity and costly punishment. Nature 444, 718–723 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  16. Jacquet, J., Hauert, C., Traulsen, A. & Milinski, M. Shame and honour drive cooperation. Biol. Lett. 7, 899–901 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Bagnoli, M. & McKee, M. Voluntary contribution games: Efficient private provision of public goods. Econ. Inquiry 29, 351–366 (1991).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Milinski, M., Sommerfeld, R., Krambeck, H. J., Reed, F. A. & Marotzke, J. The collective-risk social dilemma and the prevention of simulated dangerous climate change. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 2291–2294 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  19. Milinski, M., Röhl, T. & Marotzke, J. Cooperative interaction of rich and poor can be catalyzed by intermediate climate targets: A letter. Climatic Change 109, 807–814 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Tavoni, A., Dannenberg, A., Kallis, G. & Löschel, A. Inequality, communication, and the avoidance of disastrous climate change in a public goods game. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108, 11825–11829 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  21. Fisher, B. S. et al. in Climate Change 2007: Mitigation (eds Metz, B., Davidson, O. R., Bosch, P. R., Dave, R. & Meyer, L. A.) 170–250 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).

    Google Scholar 

  22. Stevens, J. R. & Stephens, D. W. in Impulsivity: The Behavioral and Neurological Science of Discounting (eds Madden, G. J. & Bickel, W. K.) 361–387 (APA, 2009).

    Google Scholar 

  23. McClure, S. M., Laibson, D., Loewenstein, G. & Cohen, J. D. Separate neural systems value immediate and delayed monetary rewards. Science 306, 503–507 (2004).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  24. Frederick, S., Loewenstein, G. & O’Donoghue, T. Time discounting and time preference: A critical review. J. Econom. Lit. XL, 351–401 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Milinski, M., Semmann, D., Krambeck, H. J. & Marotzke, J. Stabilizing the Earth’s climate is not a losing game: Supporting evidence from public goods experiments. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 103, 3994–3998 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  26. Pan, Y. et al. A large and persistent carbon sink in the world’s forests. Science 333, 988–993 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  27. Hilbe, C., Abou Chakra, M., Altrock, P. M. & Traulsen, A. The evolution of strategic timing in collective-risk dilemmas. PLoS ONE 8, 1–6 (2013).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank the students from the University of Hamburg for participation, the students at the University of British Columbia for participation in pilot experiments, T. Burmester, S. Dobler, R. Reilly for their help and the Max-Planck-Society and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for financial support.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Studies, New York University, 285 Mercer Street, New York 10003, USA

    Jennifer Jacquet

  2. Department of Evolutionary Ecology, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology, August-Thienemann-Strasse 2, D-24306 Plön, Germany

    Kristin Hagel & Manfred Milinski

  3. Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, 1984 Mathematics Road, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2, Canada

    Christoph Hauert

  4. Department ‘The Ocean in the Earth System’, Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, Bundesstrasse 53, 20146 Hamburg, Germany

    Jochem Marotzke

  5. Research Group Evolutionary Theory, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology, August-Thienemann-Strasse 2, D-24306 Plön, Germany

    Torsten Röhl

Authors
  1. Jennifer Jacquet
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Kristin Hagel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Christoph Hauert
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Jochem Marotzke
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Torsten Röhl
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Manfred Milinski
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

J.J., C.H. and M.M. designed the experiment; K.H. and M.M. carried out the experiments; T.R. wrote the software for performing the experiment; J.J., K.H. and T.R. prepared the data and statistics; all authors wrote the paper, prepared the figures, and reviewed the paper and results.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jennifer Jacquet.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Jacquet, J., Hagel, K., Hauert, C. et al. Intra- and intergenerational discounting in the climate game. Nature Clim Change 3, 1025–1028 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2024

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2024

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing