Knowing what we don't know (and won't learn): Environmental Regulation under ''Conscious Unawareness'' and ''Negative learning''

知道我们不知道（也不会学习）的东西：“有意识的无意识”和“消极学习”下的环境规制

• 批准号: 286003652
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Daniel Heyen
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Fellowships
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2015-12-31 至 2017-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/286003652?language=en
• 关键词: Knowing; what; don; know; won

Optimal scale and timing of climate change mitigation measures crucially depend on what we do and do not know about future climate outcomes as well as the rate at which we expect to improve our understanding via scientific progress. While the presence of large uncertainties is typically invoked for timely and substantive action, the prospect of diminishing uncertainty through quick learning supports opposite calls for postponing costly and irrevocable mitigation measures until a better state of knowledge has been reached. What complicates this and similar environmental debates is the nature of uncertainty society is typically confronted with. Not only is it impossible to pinpoint exact probability distributions governing the system's behavior, decision-makers are often even unaware of outcome-relevant contingencies like yet undiscovered climate feedback processes. These ''unknown unknowns'', aggravating things further, also tend to make new information unproductive or even misleading, so-called ''negative learning''. Environmental Economics has developed a rich tool-kit for informing the normative analysis of environmental regulation. While it has repeatedly adopted insights from decision-theory and Bayesian inference to substantiate decision-making under uncertainty and learning, what Environmental Economics currently still cannot address in a sound and substantiated way is the presence of unknown unknowns and negative learning. This research project in theoretical Environmental Economics will make the first step in closing this gap, thus adding an important dimension to the existing literature. Its main contribution and challenge is to complement studies on environmental regulation with recent achievements in decision-theory. The decision-theoretic ''unawareness'' literature has developed frameworks capable of capturing set-ups in which a decision-maker is unaware of relevant contingencies. Importantly, one strand of this literature has specified to what extent a decision-maker can be aware of her own limited understanding. This ''conscious unawareness'' is a particularly apt description of the typical societal level of information in the regulation of environmental problems and thus promises to be a valuable extension of existing models in Environmental Economics. The first work package will develop a tractable framework that makes the abstract decision-theoretical insights accessible to a wider audience. Based on this methodological contribution, further work packages will add novel angles to the general literature on the Precautionary Principle, the debate about the optimal timing of climate actions, and the conditions for negative learning. Bringing these insights together, the final work package will deliver an integrated climate assessment framework for determining optimal climate decision-making under conscious unawareness and negative learning.

气候变化缓解措施的最佳规模和时机关键取决于我们对未来气候结果所做的和所不知道的，以及我们期望通过科学进步提高我们理解的速度。虽然通常在采取及时和实质性行动时会援引大量不确定性的存在，但通过快速学习减少不确定性的前景支持了相反的呼吁，即推迟代价高昂且不可撤销的缓解措施，直到达到更好的知识状态。使这场和类似的环境辩论复杂化的是社会通常面临的不确定性的性质。不仅不可能精确地确定控制系统行为的确切概率分布，而且决策者往往甚至不知道与结果相关的意外情况，比如尚未发现的气候反馈过程。这些“未知的未知因素”，使事情进一步恶化，也往往使新的信息变得无效，甚至误导，即所谓的“消极学习”。环境经济学为环境管制的规范性分析提供了丰富的工具包。虽然它一再采用决策论和贝叶斯推理的见解来证实不确定性和学习下的决策，但环境经济学目前仍然无法以健全和确凿的方式解决未知未知因素和负学习的存在。理论环境经济学的这一研究项目将为缩小这一差距迈出第一步，从而为现有文献增加一个重要的维度。它的主要贡献和挑战是用决策理论的最新成果来补充环境监管研究。决策理论的“无意识”文献已经开发出能够捕捉决策者未意识到相关意外情况的设置的框架。重要的是，这篇文献中的一段已经详细说明了决策者能够在多大程度上意识到她自己有限的理解。这种“有意识的无意识”是对环境问题监管中典型的社会信息水平的特别恰当的描述，因此有望成为环境经济学现有模型的有价值的扩展。第一个工作包将开发一个易于处理的框架，使更广泛的受众能够接触到抽象的决策理论见解。在这一方法论贡献的基础上，进一步的一揽子工作将为关于预防原则、关于气候行动的最佳时机的辩论以及消极学习的条件的一般文献增加新的角度。将这些见解结合在一起，最终的一揽子工作将提供一个综合的气候评估框架，用于在有意识的不知情和消极学习的情况下确定最佳气候决策。