Abstract
The sustainable use of common pool resources has become a significant global challenge. It is now widely accepted that specific mechanisms such as community-based management strategies, institutional responses such as resource privatization, information availability and emergent social norms can be used to constrain individual ‘harvesting’ to socially optimal levels. However, there is a paucity of research focused specifically on aligning profitability and sustainability goals. In this paper, an integrated mathematical model of a common pool resource game is developed to explore the nexus between the underlying costs and benefits of harvesting decisions and the sustainable level of a shared, dynamic resource. We derive optimal harvesting efforts analytically and then use numerical simulations to show that individuals in a group can learn to make harvesting decisions that lead to the globally optimal levels. Individual agents make their decision based on signals received and a trade-off between economic and ecological sustainability. When the balance is weighted towards profitability, acceptable economic and social outcomes emerge. However, if individual agents are solely driven by profit, the shared resource is depleted in the long run - sustainability is possible despite some greed, but too much will lead to over-exploitation.
Highlights
The sustainable use of environmental, social and technical resources has become a significant global challenge[1, 2]
common pool resource (CPR) systems are characterized by a social dilemma – the tragedy of the commons[13,14,15]
If all individuals restrained their use of the resource, contrary to their selfish motivations, it should be possible to maintain the resource at a sustainable level, benefiting the population as a whole
Summary
The sustainable use of environmental, social and technical resources has become a significant global challenge[1, 2]. Resource misuse, such as over-fishing[3,4,5] or deforestation[6,7,8] can potentially result in supply problems and lead to both economic and ecological damage. We depart from the mainstream literature on CPR systems by exploring the nexus between profitability and sustainability when individuals make a harvesting decision in a dynamic common pool resource game. We remove the implicit proportional gains assumption and replace it with the explicit consideration of profit as a measure for decision-making
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