A sustainable approach for exploiting cross-border nonrenewable resources using hybrid Game Theory and Ordinal Priority Approach

Throughout history, cross-border resources have been a major cause of conflicts and tensions among countries. Typically, involved countries put all their capacities into exploiting nonrenewable resources as much as possible to gain maximum economic benefits, compared to their neighbors. Such attitude will affect the future of Earth and human life in the shared-border areas in the mid and long term. The Game Theory, despite its broad applications and popularity, cannot dissuade free-riders from their self-centered strategies toward shared nonrenewable resources due to the higher payoff. Moreover, Game Theory cannot encourage countries to employ sustainable approaches and propel them toward renewable resources. In this global-scale case, the intermediation of objective and powerful “International Organizations” is highly needed to supervise competitive games between countries and promote sustainability in players' strategies and behaviors. This study proposes a “hybrid Game Theory and Ordinal Priority Approach” as a new solution for exploiting cross-border nonrenewable resources with the view of sustainable development. The proposed framework enables international organizations to enforce the “sustainability criteria for protecting natural resources and shifting to renewables” and control “Countries’ strategies in extracting shared nonrenewable resources.” Consequently, neighbouring countries see their desired pay-offs in sustainable strategies that regenerate the environment, decarbonize the economy, and protect societies and local communities. This study continues with an illustrative case study to discuss the applicability of hybrid Game-OPA in real world under complete and incomplete datasets. Ultimately, the performance and reliability of the hybrid Game-OPA model have been checked through a sensitivity analysis, which showed how small changes in inputs could impact final decisions.