Economic theories of managing renewable resources, such as fisheries and forestry, traditionally assume that individual harvesters are perfectly rational and thus able to compute the harvesting strategy that maximizes their discounted profits. The current paper presents an alternative approach...

This paper examines a dynamic game of exploitation of a common pool of some renewable asset by agents that sell the result of their exploitation on an oligopolistic market. A Markov Perfect Nash Equilibrium of the game is used to analyze the effects of a merger of a subset of the agents. We...

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...

Sustainability and efficiency are potentially conflicting social objectives in natural resource management. We propose a market mechanism to allocate use rights over a stochastic resource to private managers. The mechanism endogenously determines the maximal tenure length guaranteeing that the...

This note gives a brief, non-rigorous sketch of basic optimal control theory, which is a useful tool in several simple economic problems,such as those in resource and environmental economics. While the mathematical analysis in the note is self-contained, there is not much explanation and...