The impact of personal beliefs on climate change: the “battle of perspectives” revisited

Abstract

The paper proposes a multi-agent climate-economic model, the "battle of perspectives 2.0". It is an updated and improved version of the original "battle of perspectives" model, described in Janssen (1996) and Janssen/de Vries (1998). The model integrates agents with differing beliefs about economic growth and the sensitivity of the climate system and places them in environments corresponding or noncorresponding to their beliefs. In a second step, different agent types are ruling the world conjointly. Using a learning procedure based on some operators known from Genetic Algorithms, the model shows how they adapt wrong beliefs over time. It is thus an evolutionary model of climate protection decisions. The paper argues that such models may help in analyzing why cost-minimizing protection paths, derived from integrated assessment models à la Nordhaus/Sztorc (2013), are not followed. Although this view is supported by numerous authors, few such models exist. With the "battle of perspectives 2.0" the paper offers a contribution to their development. Compared to the former version, more agent types are considered and more aspects have been endogenized.

A review of agent‐based modeling of climate‐energy policy

“…Finally, while most reviewed studies examine the effectiveness of policies in reducing emissions—directly or indirectly, as through energy conservation and product/technology diffusion—an equally important feature of policies is their political feasibility, mediated by public opinion. Few ABM studies examine opinion dynamics of agents with regard to climate change and how this affects their voting decisions which translate in political support for, or resistance to, climate policies (Geisendorf, 2016; Kraan, Dalderop, Kramer, & Nikolic, 2019). Such studies, however, were not covered in our sample, as they lack a clear policy instrument or connection to emission reductions or product/technology diffusion.…”

Stranding Ahoy? Heterogeneous Transition Beliefs and Capital Investment Choices

“…Expectations in these models are usually homogeneous and model-consistent. Other contributions in the field of behavioural macroeconomics have studied transition dynamics allowing for belief/preference heterogeneity and stronger complexity in individual and systemic behaviours (e.g Dunz et al, 2021;Geisendorf, 2016;Knobloch and Mercure, 2016). A particularly relevant stream of work for us is the one studying the process of technological diffusion (Mercure, 2012;Mercure et al, 2016), which adopts a similar modelling approach rooted in discrete choice theory.…”

Integrated sustainability policy assessment – an agent-based ecological-economic model

“…Other models using genetic-algorithms to model the evolutionary dynamics in climate-economics are Janssen et al (2004) or Janssen et al (2000). The original 'battle of perspectives' model has been updated and extended to include more agent types or a different understanding of climate expenditures as green investments by Geisendorf (2016Geisendorf ( , 2017 and Geisendorf and Klippert (2017). Another climateeconomic model addressing policies for an endogenous climate change resulting from heterogeneous agent behaviour is by Nannen et al (2013).…”