Explicitly Integrating Institutions into Bioeconomic Modeling

Bioeconomic models can provide powerful insights into the interactions between people and the natural ecosystems on which they depend. For example, bioeconomic models of fisheries have long been used to provide early warnings about the sustainability of harvest levels or the impacts of new technologies. Less progress has been made in explicitly incorporating inter-agent interactions and institutions in bioeconomic models. This paper offers guidance to future bioeconomic modelling efforts through a review of the ways that institutions are or could be explicitly integrated into bioeconomic models.The overall conclusions of the review are as follows: (1) assumptions about institutions are often implicit in the construction of bioeconomic models; (2) the general structure of bioeconomic models provides several possible ways that institutions can be explicitly integrated; and (3) relatively simple approaches for explicitly integrating institutions into bioeconomic models can yield important insights.We recommend that analysts who are interested in explicitly incorporating institutions into bioeconomic models: (1) Clarify the theoretical foundations of empirical models; (2) Look for the easiest ways to explicitly depict institutions through constraints and parameters; (3) Give greater consideration to the depiction of feedback processes between outcomes and institutions; (4) Use new tools, such as social network analysis and experimental economics, to characterize behavior that is difficult to observe; and (5) Sustain and integrate modeling efforts