A Voting Architecture for the Governance of Free‐Driver Externalities, with Application to Geoengineering

By Martin Weitzman. 2015

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abating climate change is an enormous international public-goods problem with a classical “free-rider” structure. However, it is also a global “free-driver” problem because geoengineering the stratosphere with reflective particles to block incoming solar radiation is so cheap that it could essentially be undertaken unilaterally by one state perceiving itself to be in peril. This exploratory paper develops the main features of a free-driver externality in a simple model motivated by the asymmetric consequences of type-I and type-II errors. I propose a social-choice decision architecture, embodying the solution concept of a supermajority voting rule, and derive its basic properties.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd4b9581f0bb0a65065e42c93b1566f0eaa64b01

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Wake Smith
2. Gernot Wagner

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Wake Smith
2. Gernot Wagner
3. Christian Schröder de Witt
4. Thomas Hornigold

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Wake Smith
2. Gernot Wagner

Citations in the corpus

• Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment (2018, background): “…projected increases in radiative forcing in half from a particular date onward, these numbers confirm prior low estimates that invoke the ‘incredible economics’ of solar geoengineering (Barrett 2008) and descriptions of its ‘free driver’ properties (Wagner and Weitzman 2012, 2015, Weitzman 2015).”