Intergenerational Sustainability Dilemma
摘要
The framework of social dilemmas, including the prisoner’s dilemma examined in Chap. 3 , does not include intergenerational issues. Even in the case of two-stage decision games, such as the approval mechanism, the game is “played” within the same generation. The Iroquois, however, did manage to design a mechanism that transcended generations, although this is quite a challenge to describe. Initially, I considered a game that repeated the prisoner’s dilemma, starting with a model where the decisions of one generation affect the gains of the next generation’s dilemma. However, when I explained this game to my undergraduate students, they understood how the gains were calculated, but the results were disparate. Even in simple experiments among students, it wasn’t clear what was happening.