Behavioral Economics Commons^™

The Cost Of Useful Knowledge And Collective Action In Three Fisheries, James A. Wilson, James M. Acheson, Teresa Johnson

James Wilson

In a complex environment knowledge is valuable and its acquisition is costly; as a result people are careful about what to learn and how to learn it. We suggest that the dynamics of the “local” environment strongly influences the method that individuals choose to acquire useful knowledge and is one of the principal determinants of the way they compete and cooperate. We focus on theway different environments lead to different costs, especially the relative opportunity costs of search and communication and, consequently, to the emergence of different patterns of persistent cooperation and competition. In predictably regular and in predictably random …