Harvesting heterogeneous renewable resources: Uncoordinated, selfish, team-, and community-oriented strategies

Using the example of a fishing fleet harvesting in different fishing zones with different carrying capacities and growth rates, we investigate strategies for the exploitation of distributed renewable resources by a crowd of agents without centralized coordination. In agent-based simulations we compare the performance of uncoordinated random harvesting, team playing, selfish individualistic and community-oriented (Collective Intelligence or COIN) behaviours operating with long and short time-horizon planning. Demonstrating the usefulness of COIN-based harvesting, more cooperative long-term planning strategies are found to relieve the pressure on the resource, reduce fluctuations and diminish the risk of overharvesting. Further, the outcome of an evolutionary dynamics where strategies in the agent population spread proportional to relative economic performance are strongly influenced by the harvesting pressure. In order of decreasing resource abundance we find that first an uncoordinated random, then a cooperative COIN-strategy and later the selfish strategy for an overharvested resource dominate the agent population. We also report that increasing harvesting pressure increasingly favours short-term and more individualistic strategies.