Institutional designs of customary fisheries management arrangements in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Mexico

There are considerable efforts by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academia to integrate marine conservation initiatives and customary practices, such as taboos that limit resource use. However, these efforts are often pursued without a fundamental understanding of customary institutions. This paper examines the operational rules in use and the presence of institutional design principles in long-enduring and dynamic customary fisheries management institutions in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Mexico. Rather than a "blue print" for devising long-enduring institutions, this study relies on the design principles as a starting point to organize an inquiry into the institutional diversity found in customary governance regimes. Three important trends emerged from this comparative analysis: (1) despite it being notoriously difficult to define boundaries around marine resources, almost 3/4 of the cases in this study had clearly defined boundaries and membership; (2) all of the customary institutions were able to make and change rules, indicating a critical degree of flexibility and autonomy that may be necessary for adaptive management; (3) the customary institutions examined generally lacked key interactions with organizations operating at larger scales, suggesting that they may lack the institutional embeddedness required to confront some common pool resources (CPR) challenges from the broader socioeconomic, institutional and political settings in which they are embedded. Future research will be necessary to better understand how specific institutional designs are related to social and ecological outcomes in commons property institutions. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.

Game-Theoretically Allocating Resources to Catch Evaders and Payments to Stabilize Teams

Allocating resources optimally is a nontrivial task, especially when multiple

self-interested agents with conflicting goals are involved. This dissertation

uses techniques from game theory to study two classes of such problems:

allocating resources to catch agents that attempt to evade them, and allocating

payments to agents in a team in order to stabilize it. Besides discussing what

allocations are optimal from various game-theoretic perspectives, we also study

how to efficiently compute them, and if no such algorithms are found, what

computational hardness results can be proved.

The first class of problems is inspired by real-world applications such as the

TOEFL iBT test, course final exams, driver's license tests, and airport security

patrols. We call them test games and security games. This dissertation first

studies test games separately, and then proposes a framework of Catcher-Evader

games (CE games) that generalizes both test games and security games. We show

that the optimal test strategy can be efficiently computed for scored test

games, but it is hard to compute for many binary test games. Optimal Stackelberg

strategies are hard to compute for CE games, but we give an empirically

efficient algorithm for computing their Nash equilibria. We also prove that the

Nash equilibria of a CE game are interchangeable.

The second class of problems involves how to split a reward that is collectively

obtained by a team. For example, how should a startup distribute its shares, and

what salary should an enterprise pay to its employees. Several stability-based

solution concepts in cooperative game theory, such as the core, the least core,

and the nucleolus, are well suited to this purpose when the goal is to avoid

coalitions of agents breaking off. We show that some of these solution concepts

can be justified as the most stable payments under noise. Moreover, by adjusting

the noise models (to be arguably more realistic), we obtain new solution

concepts including the partial nucleolus, the multiplicative least core, and the

multiplicative nucleolus. We then study the computational complexity of those

solution concepts under the constraint of superadditivity. Our result is based

on what we call Small-Issues-Large-Team games and it applies to popular

representation schemes such as MC-nets.