Stability of cooperation in the international climate negotiations : an analysis using cooperative game theory

Global greenhouse gas emissions need to be substantially reduced to avoid dangerous climate change. As emission reductions in one country also benefit all other countries, international cooperation is needed for effective emission mitigation. It is not immediately clear if stable global climate cooperation is achievable, as each country has the right to reject an agreement. Game theory is a commonly used tool for a formal analysis of this situation. The concept of core stability nicely reproduces the requirement of consensus for decisions in the international climate negotiations and has been applied in some theoretical and numerical analyses in the literature. However, these analyses miss several important real-world properties. This thesis introduces five such properties into the model of international climate cooperation based on core stability: international economic effects, different pathways of future technological development, the influence of technological uncertainty on decision making, the influence of uncertainty about climate damages on decision making, and cooperation in non-global groups ...