Governing a Common-Pool Resource in a Directed Network

Abstract

A local public-good game played on directed networks is analyzed. The model is motivated by one-way flows of hydrological influence between cities of a river basin that may shape the level of their contribution to the conservation of wetlands. It is shown that in many (but not all) directed networks, there exists an equilibrium, sometimes socially desirable, in which some stakeholders exert maximal effort and the others free ride. It is also shown that more directed links are not always better. Finally, the model is applied to the conservation of wetlands in the Gironde estuary (France). Keywords

Best-response dynamics in directed network games

“…The latter property imposes a hierarchy on the players with respect to the one-way interactions; players on the highest level of the hierarchy are not affected by any other player, players on intermediate levels are affected by those on higher levels but not by those on lower levels, while players on the lowest level have no effect on any other player. The most direct application of this class of games is pollution management of cities along a river (Ni and Wang, 2007) or a river network (Dong et al, 2012), but the same model is used in studying the conservation of common-pool resources (Richefort and Point, 2010) and games with permission structures (van den Brink et al, 2018).…”