Leading the Way: Coalitional Stability in Technological Cooperation & Sequential Climate Policy

The World's nations have yet to reach a truly effective treaty to control the emission of greenhouse gases.� The importance of compatibility with private incentives of individual countries has been acknowledged (at least by game theorists) in designing climate policies for the post-Kyoto world.� Individually incentive-compatible agreements, however, may still be spoilt if coalitional incentives to deviate as a group exist.� As a first step toward understanding these incentives from a game-theoretic perspective, we propose a hybrid noncooperative-cooperative game theory model of coalition formation in technology collaboration.� Serious coalitional instabilities inherent to the existing climate policy architectures are revealed.� It turns out that coalitionally stable agreements are achieved via intermediate self-selecting subcoalitions.� The sequence of coalitions forming and the size of the direct and spillover effects of R&D collaboration on countries' individual production technologies determine the effectiveness of the agreements to reduce carbon emissions.� These coalitional group motives are already becoming important in the practice of climate change negotiations.Climate change policy, Coalitions, Cooperative game theory, Environmental agreements, Externalities, Mechanism design, Noncooperative game theory, R&D