When Producers Leave Cooperatives: The Interplay Between Shared and Common-Pool Resources

The sustainable use of common pool resources has become a significant global challenge. It is now widely accepted that specific mechanisms such as community-based management strategies, institutional responses such as resource privatization, information availability and emergent social norms can be used to constrain individual ‘harvesting’ to socially optimal levels. However, there is a paucity of research focused specifically on aligning profitability and sustainability goals. In this paper, an integrated mathematical model of a common pool resource game is developed to explore the nexus between the underlying costs and benefits of harvesting decisions and the sustainable level of a shared, dynamic resource. We derive optimal harvesting efforts analytically and then use numerical simulations to show that individuals in a group can learn to make harvesting decisions that lead to the globally optimal levels. Individual agents make their decision based on signals received and a trade-off between economic and ecological sustainability. When the balance is weighted towards profitability, acceptable economic and social outcomes emerge. However, if individual agents are solely driven by profit, the shared resource is depleted in the long run - sustainability is possible despite some greed, but too much will lead to over-exploitation.

The fragile common pool of resource (CPR) game is an instance of a resource sharing game where a common resource, which is prone to failure due to overuse, is shared among several players. Players have a fixed initial endowment and are faced with the task of investing in the common resource without forcing it to failure. The return from the common resource is subject to uncertainty and stochasticity, and is perceived by the players in a prospect-theoretic manner based on their behavioral characteristics. The Fragile CPR Game admits a unique Nash equilibrium (NE), and it has been shown in the literature that the best response dynamics converge to the NE. In this article, we look at the Fragile CPR Game through the lenses of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Games in Satisfaction Form</i>. We refer to the corresponding game as the Fragile SAT-CPR Game. Our main and novel result states that the Fragile SAT-CPR Game admits the optimal satisfaction equilibrium (OSE) and that the proposed risk minimizing dynamics, which are based on the best response dynamics, converge to the OSE. This equilibrium point results in minimizing the probability that the CPR collapses, while the players can obtain the same payoffs as in the NE point. Numerical evaluations indicate that in the OSE the probability that the common resource collapses can be decreased by approximately 95% compared to corresponding one in the NE case, while at the same time the players enjoy the same utility values. Our proofs employ and exploit concepts from the theory of Constrained S-modular Games.

The new millennium marks a time when scientific opinion and environmentalist sentiment are at last converging on the perception that the world's natural marine heritage is facing grave threats. What environmentalists have come to call the 'marine biodiversity crisis' is a pervasive and by now ell-documented phenomenon, until recently occurring largely unnoticed beneath the deceptively unchanging blanket of the ocean's surface. The fact that this problem is essentially an invisible one makes it all the more insidious, and our terrestrial bias makes combating the problem a huge and difficult task. Human impacts on our seas take many forms and result not only from activities that affect species directly - such as overfishing, in-filling of wetlands and coastal deforestation - but also from activities that affect oceans indirectly, such as through land-based sources of pollution, freshwater diversion from estuaries, invasive species and climate change. In tackling fisheries issues, most organizations attempt to base their projects and advocacy on the best available scientific information. The key scientific information underpinning campaigns and field projects addresses three facets of sustainability: (i) the levels of resource removal that can be realized without adverse impact on the ecosystem, given the particular environmental condition of the ecosystem at time of harvest; (ii) the least invasive means by which that harvest can be undertaken at desired levels of harvest, such that habitat impacts and by-catch are minimized; and (iii) the most appropriate stocks for large-scale harvest, namely protecting stocks that are sole representatives of genetically unique organisms and stocks whose ecological role is critically important and so not redundant. Environmental groups, however, are as diverse in their character, approach and constituencies as the environmental problems they address. They function variously as purveyors of information, as translators of scientific and management language to the vernacular, as honest brokers (although their own value systems cause some to question their honesty), as advocates and lobbyists for certain types of reform or regulatory measures, and as adversaries to management agencies and industry when invoking environmental litigation. If a common environmentalist response to fisheries-induced loss of marine biodiversity can be said to exist (and this is a dangerous assumption, given the diversity of groups and their approaches), it is to synthesize existing information, communicate it, and advocate change in policy and regulations where felt necessary. In addition, some groups go beyond fisheries-by-fisheries management reform to advocate: (i) shifting the burden of proof when evaluating fishing impacts on ecosystems; and (ii) establishing strictly protected marine reserves to further our understanding of and protect species, habitats and ecological processes. Such reserves are implemented in a variety of fashions: as components within larger, multiple-use protected areas that seek to accommodate a wide array of users; as single elements in scientifically designed reserve networks; and as one tool of many used in corridor approaches, coastal management and regional planning. Additionally, environmental groups will need to recognize and support real willingness among governmental agencies and decision makers to protect areas needed for fish spawning, feeding and migration through marine reserves, and help such forward-thinking agencies to enter into enforceable international agreements to protect shared or commons resources. The central element in these initiatives is a holistic approach - one that considers renewable living resources as part of a wider, interconnected ecosystem, one that evaluates all aspects of production or development and one that treats humans as bone fide elements of living systems. Holistic solutions are those that recognize these connections and try to minimize ecological, environmental and social costs, while maximizing the benefits (and benefit sharing) that can accrue from engagement in well-managed marine resource use.

Water is a manageable asset for drinking, food creation, and industry, and demand increases as the population increases. Water for irrigated agriculture, industry and domestic needs in India will go up to 1,072, 130, and 102 billion m3 (BCM) by the year 2050. In the state of Tamil Nadu in 2025, water needs for irrigation, domestic, livestock, and industrial sectors will be 52.7, 1.5, 1, and 2 billion m3, respectively, against the available supply of 24.6 BCM of surface water and 23 BCM of groundwater during the same period. A balance between need and supply is often difficult to achieve. By the year 2050, some 60 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities. In India and Tamil Nadu, 38 and 48 per cent of people will live in cities. Tamil Nadu is the second most urbanized state in India with 48 per cent of its population living in cities. This urban push will demand a large share of common water resources and most of the reservoir systems will face increased water demand for non-agricultural purposes, bringing in imbalances with other sectors, namely agriculture. Contrary to mounting demand, it will be difficult to facilitate the growing need for water. Furthermore, there are social and environmental costs in terms of the diversion of water from agriculture to urban uses. The discharge of sewage and industrial effluents also pollutes surface and groundwater, affecting not only human health but also the entire ecosystem. This paper examines the water management challenges in Tamil Nadu, India with respect to meeting future water demands across competing sectors.

Groundwater is a shared (common-pool) resource and, as such, is vulnerable to individual users making decisions that benefit themselves but degrade the aggregate welfare of all users. However, past theoretical and empirical studies have shown mixed results regarding whether competition among individuals actually does degrade aggregate welfare in the groundwater context. Here, we help to clarify this discord by illustrating the relationship between (1) the length of a competitive groundwater user’s foresight for the impact of their present decision on their own future costs and (2) the externalities of a competitive groundwater user’s decision on the costs of other users in other locations. Toward this end, and whereas prior work in this area often treats competitive behavior as exclusively myopic or analyzes steady state outcomes, we deploy a novel framework where user foresight is a tunable parameter and where user decisions and their environment are dynamic. In our framework, groundwater users are participants in a Receding Horizon Game where at each time step of simulation (1) a generalized game is solved to obtain the optimal (open loop) pumping sequence of all users during a given foresight horizon, (2) each user plays only their first pumping decision, and (3) the procedure is repeated from the next time step with updated state information. We compare outcomes from different foresight lengths to the maximum social welfare solution and illustrate how longer foresight for individual groundwater users decreases the negative externalities of their decisions. We also illustrate how foresight (a temporal dimension) and distance between wells (a spatial dimension) interact to shape externalities. Further, this study demonstrates the suitability of the Receding Horizon Game approach, an emerging tool in the optimization and control community, to model and optimize dynamic behavior of competitive agents in other water resources systems.

Both termites and large mammalian herbivores (LMH) are savanna ecosystem engineers that have profound impacts on ecosystem structure and function. Both of these savanna engineers modulate many common and shared dietary resources such as woody and herbaceous plant biomass, yet few studies have addressed how they impact one another. In particular, it is unclear how herbivores may influence the abundance of long‐lived termite mounds via changes in termite dietary resources such as woody and herbaceous biomass. While it has long been assumed that abundance and areal cover of termite mounds in the landscape remain relatively stable, most data are observational, and few experiments have tested how termite mound patterns may respond to biotic factors such as changes in large herbivore communities. Here, we use a broad tree density gradient and two landscape‐scale experimental manipulations—the first a multi‐guild large herbivore exclosure experiment (20 years after establishment) and the second a tree removal experiment (8 years after establishment)—to demonstrate that patterns in Odontotermes termite mound abundance and cover are unexpectedly dynamic. Termite mound abundance, but areal cover not significantly, is positively associated with experimentally controlled presence of cattle, but not wild mesoherbivores (15–1,000 kg) or megaherbivores (elephants and giraffes). Herbaceous productivity and tree density, termite dietary resources that are significantly affected by different LMH treatments, are both positive predictors of termite mound abundance. Experimental reductions of tree densities are associated with lower abundances of termite mounds. These results reveal a richly interacting web of relationships among multiple savanna ecosystem engineers and suggest that termite mound abundance and areal cover are intimately tied to herbivore‐driven resource availability.

To reduce the increasing cost of building and operating cloud data centers, cloud providers are seeking various mechanisms to achieve higher resource effectiveness. For example, cloud operators are leveraging dynamic resource management techniques to consolidate a higher density of application workloads into commodity physical servers to maximize server resource utilization. However, higher workload density is a major source of performance interference problems in multi-tenant clouds. Existing performance isolation techniques such as dedicated CPU cores for specific workloads are not enough as there are still common resource (e.g., last-level cache and memory bandwidth in memory subsystem) on the processor that are shared among all CPUs on the same NUMA node. While prior work has proposed a variety of resource partitioning techniques, it still remains unexplored to characterize the impact of memory subsystem resource partitioning for the consolidated workloads with different priorities and investigate software support to dynamically manage memory subsystem resource sharing in a real-time manner. To bridge the gap, we propose Themis, a feedback-based controller that enables a priority-aware and fairness-aware memory subsystem resource management strategy to guarantee the performance of high-priority workloads while maintaining fairness across all colocated workloads in high-density clouds. Themis is evaluated with multiple typical cloud applications in our data center environment. The results show that Themis improves the performance of various workloads by up to 3.15%, and fairness by more than 70% in memory subsystem resource allocation compared to existing state-of-the-art work.

We consider a scheduling problem with resource-dependent processing speeds in which n jobs have to be scheduled on m machines that share a common resource. The resource may be distributed arbitrarily among the machines. This distribution is under the control of the scheduler and can be changed over time. Each job j has a processing volume \(p_j \in \mathbb {N}\) and a resource requirement \(r_j \in (0,1]\). The latter indicates what fraction of the resource a job requires to run at full speed. Providing it with a larger share is not beneficial, but lowering its share results in a proportionally lowered processing speed. The goal is to schedule all jobs non-preemptively while minimizing the latest completion time.

Firms within an industry often find themselves tarred by the same brush. When accidents occur, stakeholders often punish both the offending firm and the entire industry. In this way, a firm's reputation may be tied to other firms, and so reputation may be a common resource shared by all members of an industry - what we term a reputation commons. As with many shared resources, an industry's reputation may be overexploited. A firm can benefit from the favorable reputation of an industry even as it takes individual actions that may harm this shared reputation. In this chapter, we explore when a reputation commons is likely to occur and discuss how firms individually and collectively respond to the problems associated with it. We propose that firms can solve the reputation commons problem by reducing the sanctioning ability of stakeholders and by privatizing reputation.

Embezzlement, whistleblowing, and organizational architecture: An experimental investigation

Using a laboratory experiment, we behaviourally study the impact of a sudden increase in the common-pool size on within-group conflict, i.e., the paradox of the plenty. We also consider the potential role of governance in avoiding this paradox. In the first stage, a randomly-chosen leader of the group determines how much of the common-pool resource to protect from second-stage conflict. In the next stage, each group member allocates his private endowment between working or fighting for a share of the unprotected resource. We consider two treatments: anarchy (consisting of the second stage only) and with a leader deciding in the first stage. We find that the existence of institutions is not always better than anarchy. This is aggravated when the resource size is higher. Group conflict (income) decreases (increases) only when leaders chose the strongest resource protection. When leaders are malevolent, i.e., they chose weak resource protection, outcomes are worse than when institutions are absent.

Sharing of common resources by terrestrial and satellite relays creates potentially serious interference problems. Their influence and control depend on many concerted judgments. A broad summary of interference problems and some related parameters is given in matrix format to delineate the scope of interactive concern. Major interference problem categories include hybrid modes, crossbreed modes, implementation and administration, performance, and resource utilization. Parameters are categorized by earth stations, satellites, systems, radio relay, noise standards, and miscellaneous. The summary also aids in highlighting distinctive related features of the Bell Telephone System's domestic satellite proposal to the Federal Communication Commission in Docket 16495.

This chapter describes some of the design tradeoffs arising from the interaction between synthetic circuits and the host organism. It first considers the effects of competition for shared cellular resources on circuits' behavior. In particular, circuits (endogenous and exogenous) share a number of cellular resources. The insertion or induction of synthetic circuits in the cellular environment changes for these resources, with possibly undesired repercussions on the functioning of the circuits. Independent circuits may become coupled when they share common resources that are not in overabundance. This fact leads to constraints among the concentrations of proteins in synthetic circuits, which should be accounted for in the design phase. Next, the chapter looks at the effect of biological noise on the design of devices requiring high gains. Specifically, the chapter illustrates possible design tradeoffs between retroactivity attenuation and noise amplification that emerge due to the intrinsic noise of biomolecular reactions.

We study an interacting particle system whose dynamics depends on aninteracting random environment. As the number of particles growslarge, the transition rate of the particles slows down (perhapsbecause they share a common resource of fixed capacity). Thetransition rate of a particle is determined by its state, by theempirical distribution of all the particles and by a rapidly varyingenvironment. The transitions of the environment are determined bythe empirical distribution of the particles. We prove thepropagation of chaos on the path space of the particles andestablish that the limiting trajectory of the empirical measure ofthe states of the particles satisfies a deterministic differentialequation. This deterministic differential equation involves the timeaverages of the environment process.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;We apply the results on particle systems to understand the behavior of computer networks where users access a shared resource using a distributed random Medium Access Control (MAC) algorithm. MAC algorithms are used in all Local Area Network (LAN), and have been notoriously difficult to analyze. Our analysis allows us to provide simple and explicit expressions of the network performance under such algorithms.