Leadership and self-enforcing international environmental agreements with non-negative emissions

Abstract

For the widely-used linear-quadratic model of stable IEAs the key results are: (i) if the members of the IEA act in a Cournot fashion with respect to non-signatories, a stable IEA has no more than 2 signatories; (ii) if the signatories act as Stackelberg leaders, a stable IEA can have any number of signatories. These results were derived using numerical simulations and ignored the non-negativity constraint on emissions. Recent papers using analytical approaches and explicitly recognising the non-negativity constraint have suggested that with Stackelberg leadership a stable IEA has at most four signatories. Such papers have introduced non-negativity constraints by restricting parameter values to ensure interior solutions for emissions, which restricts the number of signatories. We use the more appropriate approach of directly imposing the non-negativity constraint on emissions, recognising that for some parameter values this will entail corner solutions, and show, analytically, that the key results from the literature go through.

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