Sustainable coalitions in the commons

Abstract

It is well known that the non-cooperation among agents harvesting a renewable resource is critical for its sustainable management. The present paper gives insights on the complex balance between coalitions structure, resource state or dynamics and agents’ heterogeneity to avoid bio-economic collapses. A model bringing together coalition games and a viability approach is proposed to focus on the compatibility between bio-economic constraints and an exploited common stock dynamics. It is examined to what extent cooperation promotes sustainability. Based on the Shapley value, a measure of the marginal contribution of the users to the sustainability of the resource is proposed. It suggests that the stability of the grand coalition occurs for large enough stocks. By contrast, for lower levels of resource, the most efficient user plays the role of a dictator.Renewable resource, dynamic game, coalition, maxmin strategy, shapley value, viability kernel