A Stochastic Dynamic Nash Game Analysis of Policies for Managing the Strategic Petroleum Reserves of Consuming Nations

In this paper we present a Nash dynamic game model of interactions among oil inventory and tariff policies for oil importing countries. The inventory policies consist of the rates for building up and drawing down strategic oil reserves, while the tariff policies consist of setting tariffs as a function of the state of the world oil market. The model represents a stochastic game in which countries are grouped into two players, where each player in the game chooses its individual policies to maximize expected social welfare. We use the model to present empirical results about the sizes of the stockpiles as a function of disruption probabilities, tariff policies and cooperation versus noncooperation between nations. In addition to results regarding the build-up and draw down rates as a function of the amount of disruption or probability of future disruption our central conclusion is that build-up and drawdown policies are essentially the same with or without international cooperation, due to the current inventory limits on U.S. and Foreign Strategic Petroleum Reserves.