The biodiversity supergame

This paper considers the ability of developed countries to sustain a cooperative agreement to compensate developing countries for the “incremental costs” of biodiversity conservation. It is shown that, depending on certain parameter values and the model specification, such an agreement could only codify the non-cooperative outcome or achieve the full cooperative outcome where global net benefits are maximized. However, where the agreement can sustain the full cooperative outcome, net benefits will be only slightly larger than in the noncooperative outcome. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1994