On the Impact of Cross-Country Imitation on Climate Change: A Game-Theoretical Analysis

IFAC Journal of Systems and Control

Authors

Bouchra Mroué

Anthony Couthures

Samson Lasaulce

Irinel-Constantin Morărescu

Published

June 2025

Abstract
As far as climate change is concerned, a recurrent question that is asked either at the government or a consumer level is: Why should I make efforts to reduce my CO2 emission levels whereas the others will not make these efforts? The present paper provides qualitative elements to this question when asked at the government level. More precisely, we assume that each country wants to maximize a tradeoff between an individual benefit brought by emitting CO2 and an economical damage due to climate change while being influenced by the reduction strategies of the other countries. The influence term is key for the analysis and enables more virtuous or cooperative behavior. Mathematically speaking, the contribution of this paper is: to propose an abstracted model of a complex decision problem; to integrate an abstracted model of climate change in the game of interest; to conduct the complete Nash equilibrium analysis of the proposed game (existence, uniqueness, expression, quantitative analysis); to conduct a detailed numerical analysis to quantify the discussed aspects such as the impact of cross-country imitation on the atmospheric global temperature in 2100.

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Citation

BibTeX citation:
@article{mroué2025,
  author = {Mroué, Bouchra and Couthures, Anthony and Lasaulce, Samson
    and Morărescu, Irinel-Constantin},
  title = {On the {Impact} of {Cross-Country} {Imitation} on {Climate}
    {Change:} {A} {Game-Theoretical} {Analysis}},
  journal = {IFAC Journal of Systems and Control},
  volume = {32},
  pages = {100309},
  date = {2025-06},
  url = {https://anthonycouthures.github.io/publications/2025_ifac-jsc_cross-country-imitation-climate.html},
  doi = {10.1016/j.ifacsc.2025.100309},
  langid = {en},
  abstract = {As far as climate change is concerned, a recurrent
    question that is asked either at the government or a consumer level
    is: Why should I make efforts to reduce my CO2 emission levels
    whereas the others will not make these efforts? The present paper
    provides qualitative elements to this question when asked at the
    government level. More precisely, we assume that each country wants
    to maximize a tradeoff between an individual benefit brought by
    emitting CO2 and an economical damage due to climate change while
    being influenced by the reduction strategies of the other countries.
    The influence term is key for the analysis and enables more virtuous
    or cooperative behavior. Mathematically speaking, the contribution
    of this paper is: to propose an abstracted model of a complex
    decision problem; to integrate an abstracted model of climate change
    in the game of interest; to conduct the complete Nash equilibrium
    analysis of the proposed game (existence, uniqueness, expression,
    quantitative analysis); to conduct a detailed numerical analysis to
    quantify the discussed aspects such as the impact of cross-country
    imitation on the atmospheric global temperature in 2100.}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Bouchra Mroué, Anthony Couthures, Samson Lasaulce, and Irinel-Constantin Morărescu. 2025. “On the Impact of Cross-Country Imitation on Climate Change: A Game-Theoretical Analysis.” IFAC Journal of Systems and Control 32: 100309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacsc.2025.100309.