In a Small Fish War two agents interacting on a body of water have essentially two options: they can Â…fish with restraint or without. Fishing with restraint is not harmful; Â…shing without yields a higher immediate catch, but may induce lower future catches. Inspired by recent work in biology, we introduce into this setting rarity value and Allee effects. Rarity value means that extreme scarcity of the Â…sh may affect its unit proÂ…t 'explosively'. An Allee effect implies that if the population size or density falls below a so-called Allee threshold, then only negative growth rates can occur from then on. We examine equilibrium behavior of the agents under the limiting average reward criterion and the sustainability of the common-pool resource system. Assuming Â…fixed prices at fiÂ…rst, we show that patience on the part of the agents is beneÂ…cial to both sustainable high catches and Â…fish stocks. An Allee effect can not influence the set of equilibrium rewards unless the Allee threshold is (unrealistically) high. A price mechanism reflecting effects of the resource's scarcity, is then imposed. We obtain a rather subtle picture of what may occur. Patience may be detrimental to the sustainability of a high Â…fish stock and it may be compatible with equilibrium behavior to exhaust the resource almost completely. However, this result does not hold in general but it depends on complex relations between the Allee threshold, the dynamics in the (interactive) resource and price systems, and the actual scarcity caused if the agents show no restraint.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Max Planck Institute of Economics, Evolutionary Economics Group in its series Papers on Econonmics and Evolution with number
2007-24.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: