An experimental comparison of negotiation strategies for siting NIMBY facilities

The quality of the urban living environment is strongly related to the provision and planning or design of public facilities, of which NIMBY, not-in-my-back-yard, facilities are often resisted by residents. Therefore, selecting the location for NIMBY facilities has become more and more difficult and time consuming. In Taiwan in particular, when the tenure landholding system is adopted, along with financial difficulties, frequent mass protests take place in relation to environmental issues, and consequently lead to financial development issues for the country. Hence, the interaction between the government and the public becomes critical and urgent. O'Hare believes that NIMBY facilities can be seen as a prisoner's dilemma game in game theory, and Camerer also points out that public issues such as environmental concerns are also a type of prisoner's dilemma game. This research adopts an alternative methodology to that of Axelrod, in which a computer simulation was used to compare interactive strategies in prisoner's dilemma games. On the basis of a deductive analysis comparing different interactive strategies in prisoner's dilemma games, in this research an experiment was conducted to verify empirically the results of that analysis in the context of siting NIMBY facilities. The experiment has once again proven that tit-for-tat is indeed a comparatively more effective strategy than the others, not only for the player under consideration, but also for the society as a whole, with the assumption of symmetric information, and it can be used as a reference when political decisions are to be made from the government regarding NIMBY facilities.