Time Restrictions in Natural Resource Management : A Dynamic and Stochastic Analysis

This article provides a theoretical study of temporal restrictions in the context of natural resource management in North America. The economic inefficiencies arising from the use of temporal restrictions to protect natural resources have been well documented by researchers. We first demonstrate that in the presence of uncertainty about the evolution of the resource stock, temporal restrictions can lead to the collapse of the resource that is sought to be protected. Given this result, in the second part of the paper, we discuss an approach to natural resource management under uncertainty in which temporal restrictions are used to maximize the probability that a specific resource will not collapse in the long run