Conference Agenda

Narratives and models drive our understanding of the world. Especially in times of substantial change, formerly well-working narratives and models may lead to beliefs and predictions that do not match observations anymore.

We develop an ecological-economic model of resource management that takes narratives into account. In particular, we allow for both different narrative types and agents switching to more suitable narratives only when deviations between observation and beliefs become too large. Our modeling approach is based on empirical data. This data demonstrates that in the past agents only changed their action when their believes about a resource stocks deviated 25-50% from reality. Further, most agents follow a narrative of agency, meaning that they believe their action impacts the resource stock. Few people follow a narrative of exogenous resource stocks that they cannot influence, i.e. of no-agency.

With our model, we demonstrate that a steady state resource stock depends on the prevailing narrative. For the example of climate change, we show that both emissions and the carbon concentration are smaller under an agency than a no-agency narrative. On the contrary, for a fishery we find that only the fish stock is larger under an agency than a no agency narrative and harvest levels can be smaller or larger. While realized overall profits are larger under an agency narrative, beliefs on overall profits are larger under a no-agency narrative, possibly explaining the prevalence of this narrative type. As the accepted deviations between observations and beliefs also influence outcomes, policy implications emerging from our analysis relate to keeping this difference small, and on including regular updating into resource management.