ANNOUNCEMENTS
Climate change is a pressing issue today, with anthropogenic activities causing large-scale environmental degradation at a rapid pace. Solving the climate crisis requires us to delve deeper into the root causes of the escalating problem, which inevitably leads us to consider the long term impacts of individual actions in the context of environmental degradation. In order to effectively account for the variety of factors impacting microeconomic decision making - economic, social, psychological and cultural, among many others - this paper develops numerous game theoretic and mathematical frameworks that provide a more realistic representation of environmental decision-making. It incorporates the principle of least effort, the present bias, the status quo bias and social contagion as additively separable components of the utility functions faced by individuals and concludes conditions under which they will be incentivized to follow sustainable practices. Simultaneous games, sequential games and repeated games have been developed for the same. The derivations show that as long as the net environmental benefits exceed the psychological benefits attained from acting in accordance with their cognitive biases, individuals will be incentivized to follow sustainable practices. Research in behavioral economics suggests policy measures to overcome such cognitive barriers, which have been categorized and summarized according to the different components of the utility functions developed in this paper.
Keywords: cognitive biases, environmental decision making, game theory, mathematical modeling, repeated games, dynamic games, sustainable practices, proenvironmental behavior, behavioral economics.
