How well do economic games model collective climate action? A scoping review

This study critically and constructively assesses how ‘economic games’ contribute to climate policy research via a pre-registered systematic scoping review of 165 sources. Researchers use economic games as empirical tools to measure cooperation while experimentally controlling the presence, absence or levels of potential influencing factors. This review covers multiple game structures, including public goods games, common pool resource problems and threshold games. It describes how, by simplifying trade-offs between individual and collective interests, economic games have been fruitful in advancing our understanding of relevant cooperative behaviour. However, because the climate crisis is a complex, multi-dimensional cooperation problem on a global scale, translating the empirical findings from this research to climate policy is not straightforward. Assessing the body of relevant research, the scoping review systematically evaluates the most significant challenges in aligning economic games with real-world climate policy problems. It identifies seven specific discrepancies between economic games and the context of climate policy and action: (1) Games usually begin at a neutral starting point with no pre-existing cooperation level or communication; (2) Game outcomes are often abstract or symbolic; (3) Games commonly do not involve cooperation towards a true public good; (4) Almost all games model cooperation as giving money to a common pot, or taking it from a common pot, not as refraining from harmful activity; (5) Games use salient, direct choices between private and public payoffs rather than avoidance of (often uncertain) externalities; (6) Games frequently focus on preventing a probabilistic catastrophe determined by a binary threshold, rather than altering a distribution of outcomes over time and space; (7) Games involve a single cooperative behaviour (giving or taking tokens) that does not reflect real-world heterogeneity of climate actions. The review considers the implications of these findings for policy, offers constructive suggestions for game design, and highlights new research questions that, if addressed, might increase the contribution of economic games to climate policy.

Policy insights:

• Researchers have used economic games to identify factors likely to boost cooperation to address climate change.
• This scoping review assists interpretation of these findings for policy by critically and constructively assessing the current body of research, analysing how games map onto real-world climate policy problems, helping to inform better inferences.
• The review identifies seven specific issues to consider when making inferences from economic games to policy contexts.
• The review suggests new research questions and game designs that can assist policymaking and make findings more relevant to specific climate policy problems.