When Beliefs About Future Create Future - Exploitation of a Common Ecosystem from a New Perspective

In this paper, a model of an ecosystem influenced by a large human population is presented. It is modelled by a discrete time dynamic game with many players and a simple dynamics. The paper proposes a new way to look at the problems of exploitation of ecosystems by many users — using the author's concept of belief distorted Nash equilibria (BDNE) — new kind of equilibria in games in which the information of players may be distorted. In such situations Nash equilibrium ceases to be an adequate solution. One of important results of this paper is showing the role of properly designed ecological education as a very important factor influencing information that is crucial for players' decision making processes and, therefore, the state of the ecosystem itself.