An Optimal Stopping Approach to the Conservation of Biodiversity

NOTE: The following is a description of the paper and not the actual abstract. In the recent past, a considerable amount of concern has been expressed in academic circles about the diminution in the world's diverse biological resources. In particular, it has been suggested that the problem of biodiversity loss is actually a problem of controlling the natural habitat conversion process in which naturally existing species have systematically been replaced by human chosen ones. In this way of looking at the problem, a regulatory authority's principal task is to determine the optimal point at which this conversion process should be halted. In this paper, the theory of optimal stopping is used to model the biodiversity loss problem as described above. Specifically, the underlying conservation question is studied within the framework of a Markov decision process. This framework is then used to determine the optimal point at which the natural habitat conversion process should be halted