Common pool resource management under ecological risks[Gestion des ressources communes en cas de risques écologiques]

In this study, we explore how environmental risk influences the extraction of a common pool resource. Through a dynamic and non-cooperative game framework, where an environmental event affects both the renewability and quality of the resource, we demonstrate that anticipating such an event introduces ambiguity into its impact on extraction and the tragedy of the commons. Different from the existing literature, we focus on the impact of an important economic component which is the elasticity of the intertemporal substitution. Our results document a rich variety of results that have not been presented in the literature. When faced with the risk of reduced renewability and the deterioration in resource quality, agents' intertemporal elasticity of substitution has a qualitative impact on the implications of the environmental risk on the resource extraction. In addition, we also show that, for a given elasticity of substitution, a social planner and non-cooperative agents may react in opposite directions with respect to an environmental risk, implying a reduced renewability and the deterioration in resource quality. This result confirms the importance of proposing an analysis based on both non-cooperative dynamic game setting and the social planner's program.