The Queuing Theoretic Approach to Groundwater Management.

In this paper I propose and develop a new framework for modeling groundwater management issues. Specifically, I apply the methods of queuing theory—for the first time, to the best of my knowledge—to model a groundwater management problem from a long-run perspective. I characterize two simple management regimes as two different kinds of queues and then show how to pose a manager's decision problem as an optimization problem using queuing theoretic techniques. I solve for certain fundamental quantities, such as the expected system size, and then discuss the economic meaning and relevance of the queuing concepts being used. I close by discussing possible extensions to my basic models.