Les conflits sur les problèmes de l'eau (document en anglais)

Introduction

The conflicts over water issues are not limited to sharing of

costs or benefits; a problem that have had many water scholars fo-cused on. Conflicts also arise from social and political aspects of the

design, operation and management of water projects. When ana-lyzing, operating or designing a complex water project, a decision

maker must ensure that the undertaking is not only physically,

environmentally, financially and economically feasible, but also so-cially and politically feasible. This is challenging for engineers who

conventionally measure performance in economic, financial, and

physical terms. Optimization techniques, such as linear or dynamic

programming, can find the optimal values of the decision variables

in such terms. However, if not formulated correctly, they might fail

to provide insights into the strategic behaviors of the local, regio-nal, and policy decision makers to reach an optimal outcome and

the attainability of such outcome from the status quo.

Interest in water resources conflict resolution has increased

over the last decades (Dinar, 2004) and various quantitative and

qualitative methods have been proposed for conflict resolution

in water resources management, including, but not limited to

Interactive Computer-Assisted Negotiation Support system (ICANS)

(Thiessen and Loucks, 1992; Thiessen et al., 1998), Graph Model

for Conflict Resolution (GMCR) (Kilgour et al., 1996; Hipel et al.,

1997), Shared Vision Modeling (Lund and Palmer, 1997), Adjusted

Winner (AW) mechanism (Massoud, 2000), Alternative Dispute

Resolution (ADR) (Wolf, 2000), Multivariate Analysis Biplot (Losa

et al., 2001), and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (Giordano et al., 2005).

Wolf (2002)presents some significant papers and case studies on

the prevention and resolution of conflict (using descriptive meth-ods) over water resources.

Game theory provides a framework for studying the strategic

actions of individual decision makers to develop more broadly

acceptable solutions. However, game theory is not yet well inte-grated into general systems analysis for water resources. Thus,

game theory’s value might remain unclear to the water resources

community due to lack of understanding its basic concepts. As with

other disciplines (e.g. economics, political science, social science,

computer intelligence, etc.) water scholars will become more inter-ested in game theory as they come to realize its novel and useful

insights into water resources problems which are not obtainable

from conventional systems engineering methods. In general, game

theory results are closer to practice as this method better reflects

the behaviors of the involved parties, something often neglected

by conventional optimization methods for solving multi-criteria

multi-decision-maker problems.

This paper illustrates the utility of game theory in water sys-tems analysis and conflict resolution by discussing the basic con-cepts of game theory and presenting some simple two-by-two

water resource games. It is also discussed how the dynamic

structure of water resource problems and game evolution might

affect the behaviors of stakeholders in different periods of the

conflict.

0022-1694/$ - see front matter2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2009.11.045

*Tel.: +1 951 827 9774; fax: +1 951 827 3993.

E-mail address:kaveh@ucr.edu

Journal of Hydrology 381 (2010) 225–238

Contents lists available atScienceDirect

Journal of Hydrology

journal h omepage: www.elsevier. com/lo cate/jhydrol

Game theory

Game theory is essentially the mathematical study of competi-tion and cooperation. It illustrates how strategic interactions

among players result in overall outcomes with respect to the pref-erences of those players. Such outcomes might not have been in-tended by any player (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

2006). Games are defined mathematical objects, consisting of a

set of players, a set of strategies (options or moves) available to

them, and specification of players’ payoffs for each combination

of such strategies (possible outcomes of the game). The payoffs

to players determine the decisions made and the type of the game

being played. If the payoffs sum up to zero or a constant then the

players have opposing interests and are playing a zero-sum-game

or a constant-sum game; whatever one player wins, the other

player loses. Non-zero-sum games, in which the sum of payoffs

does not equal zero or a constant, have more complications, and

sometimes more potential for cooperation.

Game theory can be used to predict how people behave, follow-ing their own interests, in conflicts.

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