About ClimatEx
From a researcher’s point of view, ClimatEx is a web-based platform for running simple economic experiments in the context of climate change. It is designed as a flexible environment where variables can be easily manipulated to create different experimental conditions to study economic behaviour under uncertainty and risk.
From the user’s perspective, ClimatEx is an online game where, over a number of rounds, the players have to take decisions with regards to their Income (I) and how to allocate it between a Savings account (S) and a Climate Fund (CF). More specifically, an endowment (or income) is received every round (to be interpreted as discretionary income) and players are told that the accumulated savings will be lost with a certain, high probability. By allocating part of this income to a Climate Fund, they can reduce the risk that their Accumulated Savings (AS) are lost at the end of the game.
The game is played for a fixed number of rounds (that may or may not be communicated to the players) and the final economic situation of the players will depend on the allocation decisions between the two accounts throughout the game. Would they decide to keep all their income in the savings account (nothing put into CF), they run a very high risk, as they will most likely lose all their accumulated savings. On the other hand, the more money is put into the CF, the more the probability of loss decreases, so the lower the risk on the AS account. However, putting too much money into the Climate Fund would result in a high chance of keeping the AS account, with a very modest amount of money in it (the accumulated savings across all rounds, where the savings in round n would be: S(n)=I-CF(n)). The players are, thus, challenged to find an optimum investment level, which is not necessarily to be understood as the mathematical optimum, but may also be a subjective optimum, depending on the experimental conditions, but also on the background of the players, their understanding of the game, their interest, their risk attitudes etc.
Background
ClimatEx was developed by Bert de Vries and Cristina Apetrei as part of the GSD project. The programming in PHP is the work of Christian Michel. The conceptual model behind ClimatEx as well as a series of experiments and their results are described in Cristina’s M.Sc. thesis (2010): “Understanding Climate Change: Economic Behaviour under Risk and Uncertainty”
Learn More
Gradually we will add here more information about ClimatEx. In the meantime, if you would like to know more or be invited to try out ClimatEx, please contact us!