“ if you want to get a group of people to cooperate on something, you might arrange them on an imaginary line and declare that a person is liable to be punished if and only if the person to their left is cooperating while they are not. “
Public Release: 25-Aug-2015
University of Warwick
IMAGE: This is a diagram of two possible strategies of targeted punishment studied in the paper.
Credit: Royal Society Open Science
Targeted punishments could provide a path to international climate change cooperation, new research in game theory has found.
Conducted at the University of Warwick, the research suggests that in situations such as climate change, where everyone would be better off if everyone cooperated but it may not be individually advantageous to do so, the use of a strategy called ‘targeted punishment’ could help shift society towards global cooperation.
Despite the name, the ‘targeted punishment’ mechanism can apply to positive or negative incentives. The research argues that the key factor is that these incentives are not necessarily applied to everyone who may seem to deserve them. Rather, rules should be devised according to which only a small number of players are considered responsible at any one time.
The study’s author Dr Samuel Johnson, from the University of Warwick’s Mathematics Institute, explains:
“It is well known that some form of punishment, or positive incentives, can help maintain cooperation in situations where almost everyone is already cooperating, such as in a country with very little crime. But when there are only a few people cooperating and many more not doing so punishment can be too dilute to have any effect. In this regard, the international community is a bit like a failed state.”
The paper, published in Royal Society Open Science and freely accessible online, shows that in situations of entrenched defection (non-cooperation), there exist strategies of ‘targeted punishment’ available to would-be punishers which can allow them to move a community towards global cooperation.
“The idea”, said Dr Johnson, “is not to punish everyone who is defecting, but rather to devise a rule whereby only a small number of defectors are considered at fault at any one time. For example, if you want to get a group of people to cooperate on something, you might arrange them on an imaginary line and declare that a person is liable to be punished if and only if the person to their left is cooperating while they are not. This way, those people considered at fault will find themselves under a lot more pressure than if responsibility were distributed, and cooperation can build up gradually as each person decides to fall in line when the spotlight reaches them.”
For the case of climate change, the paper suggests that countries should be divided into groups, and these groups placed in some order – ideally, according roughly to their natural tendencies to cooperate. Governments would make commitments (to reduce emissions or leave fossil fuels in the ground, for instance) conditional on the performance of the group before them. This way, any combination of sanctions and positive incentives that other countries might be willing to impose would have a much greater effect.
“In the mathematical model”, said Dr Johnson, “the mechanism works best if the players are somewhat irrational. It seems a reasonable assumption that this might apply to the international community.”
Categories: Environmental
Engineering Evil 
I can’t understand all the angst about governments, corporations, and even individuals being so wound up about something that is not the problem. Global warming, along with several other factors, are just a symptom of the problem. From many articles, videos, and studies I have seen on the internet I believe the problem is what is happening to Earth from the sun and the rest of the outer cosmos. Firstly, the magnetic shield around the Earth is diminishing in its power to protect us from solar and cosmic radiation and other elements from outer space. The shield is diminishing in an exact mirror image of the “hockey stick” pattern of the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere during much the same time period, and there is nothing governments, corporations or us can do about it.
Secondly, other factors involved here are more volcanic action, more earthquakes and even, the scientists believe, some tectonic shifting. These last three factors probably are accountable for most of the CO2 build up in the atmosphere and the acidification of the oceans rather than all the use of burning fossil fuels. Along with all this the scientists worry that Earth may, in the ‘near future’, experience a magnetic pole shift which has a lot of other ramifications the experts could not even hazard guess about.
All of the planets of the solar system are experiencing the same thing to lesser or greater degrees.
Also, some other factors are that the tilt of the Earth has shifted a bit which could have some influence, and the entire solar system has orbited to a different area in the cosmos (the milky way) and may be in an area of different energy influences.
I can’t see that laying blame on certain governments, certain world commodities, and by throwing a whole lot of money at it will solve this problem.
I also cannot understand why we never hear about any of these HUGE influences on our poor little world in the ‘mainline media’. Is it only a few “quack” scientists on the internet that see these problems.
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Reblogged this on Brittius.
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