Angelo Antoci

Maladaptation is steadily increasing its presence in agenda and debates about climate change and its impacts. The term denotes actions undertaken, at the individual or collective level, to defend against the adverse effects of climate change or environmental degradation, but that ultimately exacerbate the underlying risk factors. In this paper, we investigate the effects of maladaptation in terms of well-being and inequality in a two-population (North–South) evolutionary model. While agents in the South often face higher vulnerability to environmental degradation and limited defense mechanisms compared to their Northern counterparts, the latter stand to endure greater economic losses, in absolute terms. Our model demonstrates that the diffusion of maladaptive choices could result in a Pareto-dominated steady state, influencing inequality levels positively or negatively based on the scale of maladaptation impacts relative to the existing environmental degradation. These findings stress the imperative of integrating environmental risk studies with maladaptive effects and dynamics. Additionally, they advocate for international discourse not only on climate change mitigation but also on adaptive measures among countries.

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018) testifies, the world is a long way from halting climate change, let alone reverting it. The existence of adaptation and mitigation technologies did not prove sufficient, their adoption being respectively faulted or hindered by the presence of externalities. In this work, we study how externalities, whether positive or negative, lead the system away from Pareto-dominant (social optimum) states, towards Pareto-dominated ones. We show that adoption gaps, i.e. differences between socially optimum vs current adoption shares, of both (mal)adaptation and mitigation technologies are caused by the externalities emitted. In particular, over-adoption may occur for maladaptive technologies, whereas under-adoption may occur in case of mitigation. We employ a model with two regions at different stages of development and also derive relevant considerations on possible counterproductive effects of green policies and environmental dumping.

This paper analyzes an intertemporal optimization problem in which agents derive utility from three goods: leisure, a public environmental good and the consumption of a produced good. The global analysis of the dynamic system generated by the optimization problem shows that global indeterminacy may arise: given the initial values of the state variables, the economy may converge to different steady states, by choosing different initial values of the control variable.

This paper studies environmental corruption via a random‐matching evolutionary game between a population of firms and a population of bureaucrats who have to decide whether to release a ‘green’ licence to the firms. A firm obtains the licence if the bureaucrat checks that it complies with environmental regulations, otherwise it is sanctioned. The model assumes that there are two types of bureaucrats (honest and dishonest), two types of firms (compliant and non‐compliant) and two possible crimes (corruption and extortion). Corruption occurs when a dishonest bureaucrat accepts a bribe from a non‐compliant firm, while extortion occurs when a dishonest bureaucrat claims a bribe from a compliant firm. When there is no dominance of strategies, we show that there exist two bi‐stable regimes, in which two attractive stationary states exist and two regimes with an internal stable equilibrium, corresponding to the mixed‐strategy Nash equilibrium of the one‐shot static game, surrounded by closed trajectories. From comparative statics analysis performed on the latter two dynamic regimes, it emerges that policy instruments may help the Public Administration reduce both corruption and extortion, although increasing sanctions and detection probability do not always get the desired results.

The issue of Student Evaluation of Teaching has been explored by a large literature across many decades. However, the role of social influence factors in determining teachers’ responses to a given incentive and evaluation framework has been left basically unexplored. This paper makes a first attempt in this vein by considering an evolutionary game-theoretic context where teachers face a two-stage process in which their rating depends on both students’ evaluation of their course and on retrospective students’ evaluation of their teaching output in view of students’ performance in a related follow-up course. We find that both high effort (difficult course offered) and low effort (easy course offered) outcomes may emerge, leading either to a socially optimal outcome for teachers or not, according to cases. Moreover, there may be a potential conflict between the optimal outcome for students and for teachers. We also consider possible ways to generalize our model in future research.

Adaptation against environmental degradation has the potential to generate further environmental pressures. Does this aspect of adaptation affect the inequality–environment link? To answer this question, we develop a one-sector and one-input model which integrates threats to social and environmental sustainability posed by feedback effects of agents’ adaptation strategies. We distinguish between income inequality and welfare inequality with the latter depending on environmental quality, leisure time, income level and allocation of income to consumption or adaptation. Despite its parsimony, the model describes the conditions for the existence of different inequality–environment dynamic regimes. The model confirms the standard view that environmental degradation exacerbates welfare inequality, but it also produces non-trivial and surprising insights. It illustrates that income inequality affects the type of dynamic regime followed by the economy. High-income economies and economies with high-income inequality are most at risk of following a pattern of maladaptive growth with increasing welfare inequality and environmental pressure.