Nonuniqueness of no-memory feedback equilibria in a fishery resource game (Q911442)

The paper studies a multi-agent fishery management problem where the harvesting agents (countries) have access to a common single-species fishery ground. The agents seek to determine their fishing effort rates so as to maximize the present value of net profits accruing from their activities over an infinite horizon. This set-up was first considered by \textit{C. W. Clark} [Math. Concepts Meth. Sci. Eng., Vol. 19, 117-132 (1980; Zbl 0444.90028)]. The solution concept employed is the ``feedback Nash equilibrium'' and the author shows that such a solution can be non- unique by constructing new (discontinuous) equilibria that appear for sufficiently low values of the discount rate. A prerequisite for obtaining this result is a symmetry assumption (all agents share the same profit function). An interesting feature of the ``new'' equilibria is that they allow a more efficient use of the resource than those equilibria obtained by Clark (loc. cit.). In particular, the use of the resource can be Pareto optimal if the initial stock of resource is sufficiently large.