Strategic games in groundwater management

Abstract

Previous work has shown that quality-quantity interactions may alter the typical results of private management under the assumption of myopic behavior. The main objective of the paper is to analyse the role of feedback strategies in a model containing an integrated quantity-quality approach, analyzing the impact on water use, pollution and shadow resource prices. The case of symmetric players is shown to yield results that are similar to those of models in previous literature, in that it establishes myopic and optimal solutions as extremes, with feedback solutions somewhere in between. However, as di¤erent water users do not have similar objectives or constraints, it is important to consider the case of asymmetric players. This paper shows that when agents are asymmetric, especially as regards external e¤ects, strategic solutions can be more extreme than the myopic ones.