Behavioral Game Theory

The Paris Climate Change Conference last December was hailed as a great success. As countries signed the Agreement in April there seemed an even stronger sense of optimism. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was quoted as saying: "Paris will shape the lives of all future generations in a profound way - it is their future that is at stake."  A recent article in Nature entitled 'Paris Agreement climate proposals need a boost to keep warming well below 2°C' provides a more sombre and depressing view. And the sad reality, is that the Paris Agreement is probably a step backwards, not a historic step forwards, in the fight against climate change.           The goal of previous climate agreements, like the Kyoto Protocol, was to provide binding commitments to reduce dangerous emissions. Kyoto, and all attempts at a follow up agreement, failed dismally to work. But, at least the objective was a sound one - to tackle the problem . In Paris the objectives were far less ambi

On the 23rd June the UK held a referendum on its membership of the EU and 52% of voters decided we should leave. To put things bluntly - this was the wrong decision. Politicians of all persuasions, however, have been queuing up after the vote to say that we must respect the 'democrat will' of the people. Clearly they do not have much choice, at this stage, given that a majority voted to leave. But, can we really talk of this referendum result as 'democratic'? I don't think so.           To make the case we can start with the impossibility theorems. These theorems, of which Kenneth Arrow's is the most famous prove that there is no voting mechanism that is guaranteed to produce outcomes satisfying some basic desirable properties. For instance, the choice made can be critically influenced by the options on the ballot paper (even if we add options people do not like). There are two basic ways to interpret the impossibility theorems. One is to say that they show