What is the nature of biodiversity as an economic commodity and why does it matter? How would its conservation contribute economically to our well being? I consider three issues: Why is biodiversity important from an economic perspective? What kind of commodity is it? Does our usual economic...

Biodiversity is often adversely affected by human activities. This reduces social welfare but may be external to private economic decisions. Consequently, these external effects on biodiversity need to be considered explicitly in economic models, which is only partly reflected in the literature....

We present a model of a multi-species fishery and show that (i) consumer preferences for seafood diversity may trigger a sequential collapse of fish stocks under open-access fishery, (ii) the stronger the preferences are for diversity the higher is the need for coordinated multi-species...