Extraction of non-renewable resources: a differential game approach

Exploitation of non–renewable resources is an intensively studied field of environmental economics in the last century. Since the influential Hotelling’s paper a huge progress is made in the depletable resources literature. Although a variety of methodologies is used in that problem’s solutions a basic question of time inconsistency arises in the solution process. We show the sources of dynamical time inconsistency in a leader – follower game for which the buyer leads while the extractor follows and the players employ open loop strategies. Also we make use of Markovian informational structure, in a non – renewable resource Nash game, in order to extract strategies that are time consistent. Finally we enlarge the utility function space from the logarithmic utility to the utility functions that exhibits relative risk aversion with the same, with respect to time consistency, strategies.