Strategic Exploitation of a Common Property Resource Under Uncertainty

Abstract

We study the impact of uncertainty on the strategies and dynamics of symmetric non-cooperative games among players who exploit a non-excludable resource that reproduces under uncertainty. We focus on a particular class of games that deliver a Nash equilibrium in linear-symmetric strategies of resource exploitation. We show that, for this class of games, the tragedy of the commons is always present. For various changes in the riskiness of the random primitives of the model we provide general characterizations of features of the model that explain links between the degree of riskiness and strategic exploitation decisions. Finally, we provide a specific example that demonstrates the usefulness of our general results and, within this example, we study cases where increases in risk amplify or mitigate the tragedy of the commons.