Rent-seeking and quota regulation of a renewable resource

This paper deals with rent-seeking behaviour among agents who compete for future shares of a common renewable natural resource. Rent-seeking might become profitable when the agents expect that the distribution of the natural resource in the coming periods will be dependent on the agents’ extraction of the resource in the past, even though high exploitation might reduce the stock that future individual quotas will be based upon. Whether aggressive rent-seeking behaviour by one agent will encourage other agents to rent-seek more, however, is generally found to be ambiguous.