Strategic Harvesting of Age-Structured Populations
Abstract
We study the strategic exploitation of an age-structured, common-property resource, where agents target different age classes. We present the first closed form solution for the optimal harvesting of an age-structured population, and we derive closed-form solutions for the Markov-perfect Nash equilibrium, thus extending the ‘second-generation fish war’ literature by studying a structured resource rather than a simple biomass setting. We derive conditions under which the different age classes are subject to overfishing in the non-cooperative setting, as harvest quantities are strictly higher than in the cooperative optimum, but also characterize conditions under which some age classes may be underfished.