About

Marco Janssen is a professor in the School of Sustainability and serves as the director for the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment. His research focuses on how people govern shared resources, including water, energy, and critical minerals, across various contexts such as laboratories, field studies, cyberspace, and outer space. He employs a combination of behavioral experiments, agent-based modeling, and case study analyses to address questions related to resource management and collective decision-making. His applied work includes collaborating with NGOs to test behavioral games as intervention tools for groundwater issues in rural India and engaging with artists to explore collective decision-making in extreme conditions like water scarcity in the southwestern United States or habitats on Mars. Janssen is also committed to increasing the accessibility of research and educational materials through open science and open access initiatives.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Business
• Political Science
• Computer Security
• Microeconomics
• Physics
• Psychology
• Public economics
• Biology
• Finance
• Software engineering
• Economic growth
• Mathematics
• Data science
• Programming language
• Ecology

Selected publications

• Using a farmer typology to understand heterogeneity in cover crop adoption

  Journal of Rural Studies · 2026-05-14

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• All Public Voices Are Equal, But Are Some More Equal Than Others to LLMs?

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-04-19

  articleOpen access

  Federal agencies are increasingly deploying large language models (LLMs) to process public comments submitted during notice-and-comment rulemaking, the primary mechanism through which citizens influence federal regulation. Whether these systems treat all public input equally remains largely untested. Using a counterfactual design, we held comment content constant and varied only the commenter's demographic attribution -- race, gender, and socioeconomic status -- to test whether eight LLMs available for federal use produce differential summaries of identical comments. We processed 182 public comments across 32 identity conditions, generating over 106,000 summaries. Occupation was the only identity signal to produce consistent differential treatment: the same comment attributed to a street vendor, compared to a financial analyst, received a summary that preserved less of the original meaning, used simpler language, and shifted emotional tone. This pattern held across all names, prompts, models, and regulatory contexts tested. Race effects were inconsistent and appeared driven by specific name tokens rather than racial categories; gender effects were absent. Writing quality predicted summarization outcomes through argument substance rather than surface mechanics; experimentally injected spelling and grammar errors had negligible effects. The magnitude of occupation-based differential treatment varied by model provider, meaning that selecting a model implicitly selects a level of fairness -- a dimension that current procurement frameworks such as FedRAMP do not evaluate. These findings suggest that socioeconomic signals warrant attention in AI fairness assessments for government information systems, and that fairness benchmarks could be incorporated into existing federal IT procurement processes.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Role of Unauthorized Informal Institutions in Urban Water Governance: The Case of Faisalabad, Pakistan

  Figshare · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Groundwater scarcity is an escalating global crisis, particularly in urban areas where municipal water systems struggle to meet rising demand. The existing literature attributes water insecurity, including groundwater depletion and inadequate piped water supply, to poor governance. This study examines, Faisalabad, Pakistan, where the unreliable, intermittent piped water system has led to heavy reliance on groundwater, to assess how formal and informal institutions shape urban water governance. Using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework alongside Ostrom’s design principles, the analysis identifies institutional weaknesses in local water management. The findings show that informal institutions have usurped power from formal authority, underscoring the pivotal role of informal institutions. To overhaul the governance system, the study advances two policy recommendations: (1) a “Big Bang” approach to replace the current municipal water agency with a new institution grounded in impartiality, and (2) State-Reinforced Self-Governance, through which government enables communities to collectively self-govern the aquifer.

  PublisherDOI

• Role of Unauthorized Informal Institutions in Urban Water Governance: The Case of Faisalabad, Pakistan

  Figshare · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Groundwater scarcity is an escalating global crisis, particularly in urban areas where municipal water systems struggle to meet rising demand. The existing literature attributes water insecurity, including groundwater depletion and inadequate piped water supply, to poor governance. This study examines, Faisalabad, Pakistan, where the unreliable, intermittent piped water system has led to heavy reliance on groundwater, to assess how formal and informal institutions shape urban water governance. Using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework alongside Ostrom’s design principles, the analysis identifies institutional weaknesses in local water management. The findings show that informal institutions have usurped power from formal authority, underscoring the pivotal role of informal institutions. To overhaul the governance system, the study advances two policy recommendations: (1) a “Big Bang” approach to replace the current municipal water agency with a new institution grounded in impartiality, and (2) State-Reinforced Self-Governance, through which government enables communities to collectively self-govern the aquifer.

  PublisherDOI

• Pathbreak: A Biodiversity-Food-Governance Game as a laboratory for re-imagining biodiversity governance

  SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-03-10

  preprintOpen access

  Biodiversity loss is fundamentally driven by collective-action dilemmas, yet tools making these complex trade-offs tangible remain scarce. We introduce Pathbreak: A Biodiversity–Food–Governance Game, an experiential laboratory for re-imagining biodiversity governance, developed drawing on over a decade of experience. Moving beyond stylized models, Pathbreak integrates first-order dilemmas—agricultural yields versus ecosystem resilience—with second-order challenges such as political legitimacy, trust, and intersectionality. Through qualitative analysis of debriefings from five pilot studies involving participants with a range of knowledge about biodiversity (n=50), we demonstrate the efficacy of the game as a proof-of-concept boundary object. The study shows that participants engage with economic trade-offs alongside deeper dynamics of power and policy time-lags. Despite tensions between playability and ecological realism, Pathbreak acts as a catalyst for transformative, transdisciplinary learning. This framework effectively bridges the gap between biodiversity science and the societal transformations required to reverse ecological decline.

  Publisher

• Examining the meaning of sustainability on the Moon

  Space Policy · 2026-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Modeling the Effects of Anthropogenic Activities on the Lunar Environment with a Systems-theoretic Approach

  The Planetary Science Journal · 2026-02-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract An increasing number of missions to the Moon are planned for the future. However, their long-term, cumulative impacts on the lunar environment are unknown. Research indicates that some important scientific discovery potential may be permanently lost, and exploration may become challenging due to effects of large-scale human activities. Motivated by these questions, we develop and present a generalizable systems-theoretic framework, called Sustainability Evaluations for Lunar Environment Exploration, for assessing the effects of human-built systems on the lunar environment. We contribute a scale and rate diagram of natural and anthropogenic processes on the Moon to provide comparative assessment of important processes that can dominate environmental effects and carry implications for human operations. Additionally, we derive metrics using functional-relationship diagrams of engineered systems to identify environmental effects based on exchange of matter, energy, and information. We demonstrate computation of two selected metrics: the area of the blast zone due to lunar landings and the trajectory of disturbed regolith mobilized from the lunar surface. For the cases considered, our results show that modern spacecraft (that may transport humans to the Moon) can have a landing blast zone area that would be 2–5 times larger as compared to the estimated landing blast zone area of the Apollo missions and up to 30 times larger as compared to some robotic missions. Overall, our analyses highlight the urgent need for careful and rigorous consideration of the environmental effects of engineered systems on the Moon and for understanding the important trade-offs that exist in preserving and (potentially irreversibly) altering the lunar environment.

  PublisherDOI

• Role of Unauthorized Informal Institutions in Urban Water Governance: The Case of Faisalabad, Pakistan

  Society & Natural Resources · 2026-01-01

  article

  Groundwater scarcity is an escalating global crisis, particularly in urban areas where municipal water systems struggle to meet rising demand. The existing literature attributes water insecurity, including groundwater depletion and inadequate piped water supply, to poor governance. This study examines, Faisalabad, Pakistan, where the unreliable, intermittent piped water system has led to heavy reliance on groundwater, to assess how formal and informal institutions shape urban water governance. Using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework alongside Ostrom’s design principles, the analysis identifies institutional weaknesses in local water management. The findings show that informal institutions have usurped power from formal authority, underscoring the pivotal role of informal institutions. To overhaul the governance system, the study advances two policy recommendations: (1) a “Big Bang” approach to replace the current municipal water agency with a new institution grounded in impartiality, and (2) State-Reinforced Self-Governance, through which government enables communities to collectively self-govern the aquifer.

  PublisherDOI

• All Public Voices Are Equal, But Are Some More Equal Than Others to LLMs?

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-04-19

  preprintOpen access

  Federal agencies are increasingly deploying large language models (LLMs) to process public comments submitted during notice-and-comment rulemaking, the primary mechanism through which citizens influence federal regulation. Whether these systems treat all public input equally remains largely untested. Using a counterfactual design, we held comment content constant and varied only the commenter's demographic attribution -- race, gender, and socioeconomic status -- to test whether eight LLMs available for federal use produce differential summaries of identical comments. We processed 182 public comments across 32 identity conditions, generating over 106,000 summaries. Occupation was the only identity signal to produce consistent differential treatment: the same comment attributed to a street vendor, compared to a financial analyst, received a summary that preserved less of the original meaning, used simpler language, and shifted emotional tone. This pattern held across all names, prompts, models, and regulatory contexts tested. Race effects were inconsistent and appeared driven by specific name tokens rather than racial categories; gender effects were absent. Writing quality predicted summarization outcomes through argument substance rather than surface mechanics; experimentally injected spelling and grammar errors had negligible effects. The magnitude of occupation-based differential treatment varied by model provider, meaning that selecting a model implicitly selects a level of fairness -- a dimension that current procurement frameworks such as FedRAMP do not evaluate. These findings suggest that socioeconomic signals warrant attention in AI fairness assessments for government information systems, and that fairness benchmarks could be incorporated into existing federal IT procurement processes.

  PublisherDOI

• How Large Language Models Systematically Misrepresent American Climate Opinions

  ArXiv.org · 2025-12-29

  articleOpen access

  Federal agencies and researchers increasingly use large language models to analyze and simulate public opinion. When AI mediates between the public and policymakers, accuracy across intersecting identities becomes consequential; inaccurate group-level estimates may mislead outreach, consultation, and policy design. While research examines intersectionality in LLM outputs, few studies have compared these outputs against real human responses across intersecting identities. Climate policy is one such domain, and this is particularly urgent for climate change, where opinion is contested and diverse. We investigate how LLMs represent demographic and intersectional patterns in U.S. climate opinions. We prompted six LLMs with profiles of 978 respondents from a nationally representative U.S. climate opinion survey and compared AI-generated responses to actual human answers across 20 questions. We find that LLMs appear to compress the diversity of American climate opinions, predicting less-concerned groups as more concerned and vice versa. This compression is intersectional: LLMs appear to apply uniform gender assumptions that match reality for White and Hispanic Americans but may misrepresent Black Americans, where actual gender patterns differ. These patterns, which may be invisible to standard auditing approaches, could undermine equitable climate governance.

  PublisherOA PDF

Recent grants

• SoCS: Tipping Collective Action in Social Networks

  NSF · $500k · 2012–2017

• The Dynamics of Rules in Commons Dilemmas

  NSF · $587k · 2005–2010

• Scaling up commons dilemma experiments for research and education

  NSF · $518k · 2021–2025

• CAREER: Innovation of Institutional Rules in the Governance of Common Resources

  NSF · $415k · 2008–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Элинор Остром

  53 shared

• John M. Anderies

  Asian Disaster Preparedness Center

  52 shared

• Jacopo A. Baggio

  Hospital Universitario Santa Cristina

  30 shared

• Wander Jager

  28 shared

• François Bousquet

  Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier

  22 shared

• Allen Lee

  Arizona State University

  21 shared

• Michael Schoon

  Arizona State University

  21 shared

• Juan-Camilo Cárdenas

  13 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Maastricht University

  1996

• M.A., Econometrics and Operations Research

  Erasmus University, Rotterdam

  1992