Managing a Common Renewable Resource in Asymmetric Information

• Published in: IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
• Main Authors: Catro, D Fuentes, Jayet, Pierre-Alain, Rotillon, Gilles
• Format: Paper
• Language: English
• Published: St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2000

The clear definition of property rights is not a sufficient condition to prevent congestion effects in commons. In this paper we present how interesting can be the coordination among owners in the preservation of the common good. Our approach takes into account economic dynamics and incentive mechanisms in a hidden information context. We consider a natural resource which is being used up for a continuum of producers on a common property regime. We also consider that each producer has an individual performance index which is a hidden information of the rest of players. We introduce coordination in the sense of a global maximization of the joint profit. If there is no coordination among the producers, their behavior leads to complete rent dissipation. We focus our model in the case of the producers convinced to coordinate their actions in order to preserve their own economic sustainability. Under perfect information we find that the exclusion of at subset of producers can appear and how it is endogenously determined. Under asymmetric information we propose a quantity-transfer contract which lead us to the previous stationary disposal stock of the resource without exclusion.