The precautionary principle (PP) applied to environmental policy stipulates that, in the presence of uncertainty, society must take robust preventive action to guard against worst-case outcomes. It follows that the higher the degree of uncertainty, the more aggressive this preventive action...

We study the management of ecosystems in which interacting state variables that are affected by management decisions diffuse in space. We study pattern formation first in a setting where economic agents maximize myopic profits and ignore spillovers onto agents at other sites, and second in the...