Magnus Jiborn

Reconsidering the Foole's Rejoinder: Backward Induction in Indefinitely Iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas

According to the so called “Folk Theorem” for repeated games, stable cooperative relations can be sustained in a Prisoner’s Dilemma if the game is repeated an indefinite number of times. This result depends on the possibility of applying strategies that are based on reciprocity, i.e. strategies that reward cooperation with subsequent cooperation and punish defection with subsequent defection. If future interactions are sufficiently important, i.e. if the discount rate is relatively small, each agent may be motivated to cooperate by fear of retaliation in the future.

Consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting with capital stock change highlights dynamics of fast-developing countries

Traditional consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting attributed the gap between consumption-based and production-based emissions to international trade. Yet few attempts have analyzed the temporal deviation between current emissions and future consumption, which can be explained through changes in capital stock. Here we develop a dynamic model to incorporate capital stock change in consumption-based accounting. The new model is applied using global data for 1995–2009. Our results show that global emissions embodied in consumption determined by the new model are smaller than those obtained from the traditional model. The emissions embodied in global capital stock increased steadily during the period. However, capital plays very different roles in shaping consumption-based emissions for economies with different development characteristics. As a result, the dynamic model yields similar consumption-based emissions estimation for many developed countries comparing with the traditional model, but it highlights the dynamics of fast-developing countries.Traditional carbon accounting attributes gap between consumption- and production-based emissions to international trade. The authors develop a dynamic model that incorporates capital stock change and find it improves estimates for fast-developing countries.