Game-theoretic insights into the role of environmentalism and social-ecological relevance: A cognitive model of resource consumption

Abstract

The environmental and social attitudes of consumers can greatly affect the consumption of common-pool resources by the whole societyas demonstrated by many experimental and theoretical studies. Rooting in the current knowledge of consumer psychology, and employing the game-theoretic modelling framework, we formalise the decision making process of individuals about their resource consumption levels depending on their level of environmental concern, and relative importance placed on social and ecological information. Our model demonstrates, in a stylized fashion, how profound preference to social information can help avert free-riding behaviour and result in globally stable resource consumption dynamics. This avoids the "Tragedy of the Commons", leading to affluence in the resource stock as well as in the individual consumption. Furthermore, we find that heterogeneity of the levels of individuals' environmentalism promotes free-riding, whereas heterogeneity in relative information preferences helps avoiding tragedies. Our analysis demonstrates that accounting for heterogeneity of consumers and their social relationships can yield additional insights regarding to what kind of societies may have better chances to ensure sustainable consumption of a natural resource.

Learning Through Fictitious Play in a Game-Theoretic Model of Natural Resource Consumption

“…It not only complements the insights gained by viewing distributed systems (both natural and man-made) from a control theoretic perspective, but the outcomes predicted by game-theory's underlying paradigm of rational behavior can also serve as a benchmark for any control strategies that may be applied. While the Nash Equilibrium of the static one-shot game induced by the the selected model of natural resource consumption has already been examined in [6], the issue of how the agents actually reach the equilibrium has not been discussed prior to this study. This question is addressed by the theory of learning in games where the players change their strategies dynamically according to a particular learning scheme.…”

“…The Human In The Loop (HITL) concept [5] addresses this issue by integrating human individuals as fundamental units of the system in contrast to the conventional approach of modeling human beings as exogenous inputs. In the same spirit, our selected model of resource consumption [6] employs research from social psychology [8], [9] to build a mathematical representation of consumer behavior. The social component of the model is dependent on psychological characteristics of the individual consumers such as their willingness to cooperate and the attribution of blame (nature or society) in the event of a resource crisis.…”

“…In this paper, we focus on the issue of sustainability of socio-ecological systems, a particular instance of CHANS. In particular we analyze the dynamics of a single renewable resource harvested by multiple consumers, recently proposed and studied by the authors in [6], [7].…”

“…The mathematical form of the model (see Equation (3), Section II-C) not only enables rigorous deductions and confirmation (or refusal) of theory, but also makes it amenable to analysis within multiple frameworks. For instance in the original study [6], the authors focused on the steady state properties of the model to analyze the emergence of undesirable phenomena such as free-riding. Also in [6], the model has been formulated as a static one-shot game in order to investigate the characteristics of sustainable communities under a predefined notion of sustainability.…”

“…For instance in the original study [6], the authors focused on the steady state properties of the model to analyze the emergence of undesirable phenomena such as free-riding. Also in [6], the model has been formulated as a static one-shot game in order to investigate the characteristics of sustainable communities under a predefined notion of sustainability. Subsequently, the authors have extended the model in [7] to explicify the underlying social network and also present various block models to simplify the analysis at various levels of abstraction.…”