Impact of multiple delays on the governance of risky commons.

Abstract

Long-time global cooperation is required to reduce CO_{2} emissions towards controlling climate change, one of the most paradigmatic examples of a risky common. The problem has been often modeled, theoretically, employing the so-called Collective Risk Dilemma (CRD), a threshold public goods game in the presence of risk, which has been shown to play a crucial role. Up to now, however, the long delays that mediate (i) political decisions and their implementation, (ii) implementations and their effective emissions reduction, and (iii) emissions reduction and risk assessment, have been largely ignored. Here we investigate how these multiple delays affect overall cooperation, by analyzing the evolutionary game dynamics of a recently developed variant of the CRD model where the dynamical feedback between risk and cooperation is incorporated. We show how the consideration of multiple, incremental delays may lead to scenarios that range from the conventional wisdom of straight delay-intrinsic destabilization of otherwise stable fixed points, to scenarios in which additional delays may limit the impact of delay-intrinsic destabilization. We trace these different outcomes back to the scaling relation between risk feedback and cooperation and discuss under which conditions multiple delay effects may actually foster global cooperation.