Two competing populations with a common environmental resource

TL;DR

This paper models the interaction between two populations with opposing environmental behaviors sharing a common resource, analyzing stability, resource collapse conditions, and optimal incentive strategies to promote sustainability.

Contribution

It extends feedback-evolving game models to include two populations with contrasting incentives, providing stability analysis and optimal incentive allocation strategies.

Findings

Identifies conditions leading to resource collapse.

Derives optimal consumption rates for irresponsible population.

Recommends incentive strategies to promote environmental sustainability.

Abstract

Feedback-evolving games is a framework that models the co-evolution between payoff functions and an environmental state. It serves as a useful tool to analyze many social dilemmas such as natural resource consumption, behaviors in epidemics, and the evolution of biological populations. However, it has primarily focused on the dynamics of a single population of agents. In this paper, we consider the impact of two populations of agents that share a common environmental resource. We focus on a scenario where individuals in one population are governed by an environmentally ``responsible" incentive policy, and individuals in the other population are environmentally ``irresponsible". An analysis on the asymptotic stability of the coupled system is provided, and conditions for which the resource collapses are identified. We then derive consumption rates for the irresponsible population that optimally exploit the environmental resource, and analyze how incentives should be allocated to the responsible population that most effectively promote the environment via a sensitivity analysis.