The Green Arbitrage Pricing Game

The 'Green Arbitrage Pricing Game' is a behavioral approach to the dynamics of property pricing under changing environmental regulation, social responsibility and economic expectations. Investors, asset managers, developers and occupiers of buildings find themselves in a situation, where each has a dominant strategy with the negative side effect to increase greenhouse gas emissions. But the resulting economic outcome for all is worse than using their dominated strategies to incorporate environmental externalities.A real world business case is simulating this dilemma based on the economic and social concepts of game theory. The laboratory setting in the structure of an extensive collective-action game with imperfect information is delivering experimental evidence of practical management solutions. In their roles of property investors and fund managers the players learn to understand the dynamics of the green property dilemma and to make viable strategic choices for resolving it. The game is facilitated by the strategy training toolkit 'RealInvestor' developed at the EURO Institute of Real Estate Management (www.realinvestor.net). The real world business case tackles institutional investments in the Australian office market. The simulation data is based on current input from the Green Building Council of Australia. First sets of the 'Green Arbitrage Pricing Game' were played at University of Reading, Henley Business School, School of Real Estate & Planning (United Kingdom), at Danube University Krems, Department of Building and Environment, Center of Real Estate Economics (Austria), and at Bauhaus University Weimar, Faculty of Civil Engineering (Germany). The outcome of these game sets has delivered workable strategic solutions to responsible real estate investment management.