Time restrictions in natural resource management: A dynamic and stochastic analysis

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of time restrictions in the context of natural resource management in North America. The economic inefficiencies arising from the use of time restrictions to protect natural resources have been well documented by researchers. We first show that in the presence of uncertainty about the evolution of the resource stock, time restrictions can lead to the collapse of the resource that is sought to be protected. Given this finding, in the second part of the paper, we discuss an approach to natural resource management under uncertainty in which time restrictions are used to maximize the likelihood that a particular resource will not collapse in the long run.