The Wisdom of Sustainable Communities in the Digital Era: The Case of Efficient Energy Management

Abstract

Wise management of natural resources has become a fundamental challenge nowadays. Cooperative approaches are needed in order to provide a sustainable framework for stimulating the individual awareness and participation towards common environmental objectives. In order to reach mutually beneficial outcomes, public administrations, companies, individuals and communities will need to organize for managing their aggregated consumption, reducing unnecessary use of scarce resources. This is especially true in the field of energy management where the bounded nature of the resources and the behavioural impact of the stakeholders on the overall system both play a fundamental role. The proposed research aims at contributing to what remains a challenging issue across disciplines: explaining the evolution of cooperation among unrelated individuals in human societies. We utilize an evolutionary game theoretic modelling framework to identify conditions under which collaboration among energy end-users mediated by information and communication technologies (ICT) will support its sustainable exploitation.