Enhancing Climate Change Fundraising through Crypto-Economic Mechanisms
{"type": "project", "title": "Enhancing Climate Change Fundraising through Crypto-Economic Mechanisms", "website": "https://r.pansini.altervista.org", "createdAt": 1742899484370, "userGithub": "ricpans", "credentials": {}, "description": "This research proposal seeks funding to develop and implement a Public Good Game (PGG) on the Celo blockchain to study the propensity of participants to invest in a climate change initiative. The experiment will use blockchain’s smart contracts to enhance the trust and efficiency of human collective action for environmental sustainability.\n\nResearch Objectives:\n1.\tTo design a PGG that simulates a climate change fundraising scenario on the Celo blockchain.\n2.\tTo analyse how a trustless blockchain affects participants' investment behaviour towards the public good.\n\nThe relationship between climate as a public good and collective action is intertwined. Reaching an understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms underpinning human cooperation has been one of the recent significant scientific challenges still partly unsolved.\nConsider the problem when people are asked to invest money or resources into mitigating climate change. The appropriate way to model such effort in laboratory conditions is to implement a Public Good game. Through such model, it is not up to one individual only but to a group to collectively agree to invest a necessary number of resources for plausibly curbing climate change.\n\nInitial work:\nThis project intends to expand upon an equivalent experiment the applicant ran in 2021 in China (Pansini et al. 2023). While sitting in a lab, instructions displayed on computers briefed 144 subjects taken from a voluntary pool of university students regarding the rules of the iterated Public Good Game. The results obtained show that, differently from a German model, whose none of their groups managed to coordinate and invest in group, 5 out of 8 of our groups were effective at investing for planting trees (able to reach a minimum earning threshold of 120 Yuan, necessary to plant a tree). Statistics showed a significant difference that had to be investigated further. The subjects were questioned using a social value orientation test, which established that collectivistic values allow this type of environmentally driven group cooperation to emerge.\nThese new experiments will test whether a blockchain setup further augments cooperation and investments. We have already run two pilots simulating a blockchain setup within WeChat, but we were unsuccessful at obtaining results that validate higher cooperation in the blockchain treatment. We believe this happened because the participants could not understand how the blockchain worked. We hope that this time, using both WeChat and a dApp on an actual blockchain, the players will see the advantages of a distributed ledger, lessen their social dilemmas, and cooperate statistically more thanks to the advantages of a setup built on the Celo blockchain.\n\nFeasibility:\nThe experiment has already been implemented; we just need to develop the dApp on the Celo blockchain. We have plenty of expertise in Python coding. The Celo language will be learned during the implementation of this project, also with the aid of new A.I. online tools.\nEvery year we can profit from hundreds of new subjects enrolling at university who are novel to game theory experiments but hold the basics of economic thinking. Therefore, a large sample size can be obtained easily.\nWe will publish the results regardless of whether they meet our hypothesis of a more significant fundraising effect in the blockchain treatment, thanks to the availability of plenty of journals or preprint repositories targeting this type of novel research.\n\nPansini R, Kesberg R. & Shi L. (2023) Effective cooperation leading to support of reforestation via a ‘climate public goods game’ in the Chinese collectivistic society. Research square DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3384807/v1.", "projectTwitter": "RiccardoPansin2"}