Geoengineering as Collective Experimentation

Geoengineering as Collective Experimentation

Geoengineering is defined as the 'deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth's climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming'. The technological proposals for doing this are highly speculative. Research is at an early stage, but there is a strong consensus that technologies would, if realisable, have profound and surprising ramifications. Geoengineering would seem to be an a...

Innovation Adoption and Collective Experimentation∗

I study a game in which individuals gather costly information about an innovation and share their knowledge through social ties. A person’s incentive to experiment varies with her position in the network, and strategic interactions lead to counterintuitive behavior among the most connected players. The structure of the social network and the distribution of initial beliefs jointly determine lon...

The Tuvalu Syndrome Can geoengineering solve climate’s collective action problem?

Learning While Voting: Determinants of Collective Experimentation

This paper analyzes collective decision making when individual preferences evolve through learning. Voters must take into account the effect of their votes on everyone’s learning and, hence, future preferences. The analysis is conducted in a two-arm bandit model with a safe alternative and a risky alternative whose payoff distribution, or “type”, varies across individuals and may be learned thr...

Geoengineering as a design problem

Understanding the climate impacts of solar geoengineering is essential for evaluating its benefits and risks. Most previous simulations have prescribed a particular strategy and evaluated its modeled effects. Here we turn this approach around by first choosing example climate objectives and then designing a strategy to meet those objectives in climate models. There are four essential criteria f...