On May 13, ISET hosted Jörg Spiller from the European University Viadrina, who presented his paper “Historic Debt in a Dynamic Public Good Experiment”.

At the beginning of his presentation, Mr. Spiller spoke about emissions as a global environmental problem. He claimed that the only way for nations to deal with this problem is through negotiations. However, despite the fact that negotiations would cause public gain, there is very little incentive for nations to cooperate with each other since the outcomes of negotiations are associated with private losses. As each actor has an incentive to avoid such private losses, no cooperation thus becomes the optimum solution for both industrialized and emerging nations in this case.

The presenter went on to further explain why developed and developing countries do not have incentives to cooperate. Generally, industrialized countries do not cooperate because emerging countries do not want to negotiate. Developing nations, meanwhile, do not cooperate because of two reasons: first, industrialized countries caused the problem of environmental damage in the past. Second, developing nations want to have the same opportunity to use efficient but environmentally unfriendly methods of production in order to keep up with developed countries. It is unclear whether emerging countries present the argument of an historic environmental debt as a real reason for pursuing only a minimal degree of cooperation with developed countries, or whether they just cite it as a means to enforce their own position. With this argument in mind, Mr. Spiller used a Dynamic Public Good Experiment to test whether subjects take historic accountability into consideration.

The aim of this experiment was to answer the question: is historic debt a real argument for noncooperation between developed and developing countries? The results of the study showed that although subjects do not take historic accountability into account, they strongly attempt to minimize payoff inequality.

ISET would like to thank Jörg Spiller for delivering an interesting and useful presentation to the ISET community.