Marco Janssen is a professor in the School of Sustainability and director for the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment. He explores whether experimental games can be effective intervention tools to enhance self-governing solutions in rural India. What is the effect of globalization on vulnerability of rural communities to climate change? How do we navigate short term political targets to meet long term planetary boundaries? And how do we represent human behavior in line with empirical evidence in computational models of social-ecological systems?

To address these questions he combine behavioral experiments, agent-based modeling, and case study analyses.

He is also involved with cyber infrastructure development such as comses.net for the use of agent-based modeling, and the “virtual commons” (commons.asu.edu and vcweb.asu.edu) for the use of behavioral experiments on collective action and the commons.