Abstract
Humans are altering biological systems at unprecedented rates, and these alterations often have longer-term evolutionary impacts. Most obvious is the spread of resistance to pesticides and antibiotics. There are a wide variety of management strategies available to slow this evolution, and there are many reasons for using them. In this paper, we focus on the economic aspects of evolution management and ask: When is it economically beneficial for an individual decision-maker to invest in evolution management? We derive a simple dimensionless inequality showing that it is cost-effective to manage evolution when the percentage increase in the effective life span of the biological resource that management generates is larger than the percentage increase in annual profit that could be obtained by not managing evolution. We show how this inequality can be used to determine optimal investment choices for single decision-makers, to determine Nash equilibrium investment choices for multiple interacting decision-makers, and to examine how these equilibrium choices respond to regulatory interventions aimed at stimulating investment in evolution management. Our results are illustrated with examples involving Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) crops and antibiotic use in fish farming.
Highlights
Evolutionary change in response to human actions is an increasingly important problem [1]
The left-hand side of (2) is the percentage increase in the effective life span of the excess profit stream that comes from managing evolution
Inequality (2) says that an evolution management action γ will be better than the no stewardship choice γ0 if the percentage increase in the effective life span of the biological resource from choosing γ, due to delaying evolution, is greater than the annual percentage increase in excess profit that could be obtained by using γ0 instead
Summary
Evolutionary change in response to human actions is an increasingly important problem [1]. The role of biological evolution in economic decision-making has received considerable attention [13,14], with previous studies examining a wide range of important topics from antibiotic resistance (e.g., [15,16,17,18,19]) to the role of harvesting on the evolution of fish populations (e.g., [20,21]), to the role of refuge sizes in Bt crops for preventing resistance in pest species [2,3,5,22,23,24,25] Most of these studies employ detailed and system-specific mathematical models, making it difficult to appreciate the underlying commonalities shared by all problems involving evolution management. We show how this inequality can be used to determine optimal investment choices for single decision-makers, to determine Nash equilibrium investment choices for multiple interacting decision-makers, and to examine how these equilibrium choices respond to regulatory interventions aimed at stimulating investment in evolution management
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