Choices Magazine Theme on Herbicide Resistance

There was a really nice collection of articles recently featured in Choices:

http://www.choicesmagazine.org/choices-magazine/theme-articles/herbicide/theme-overview-herbicide-resistance-management

From the theme overview:

"When resistant weeds are mobile, managing resistance can suffer from the classic “tragedy of the commons”—no one controls the resource—in this case, the effectiveness of herbicides—so no one manages it sustainably. For guidance on how to proceed, Ervin and Frisvold look to the research of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues on the management of common property resources (CPRs). "

This is the kind of work I was interested in in graduate school and this convergence of social science, economics, and genomics is very exciting. I veiwed the problem as an externality or commons problem that could be described by an Nash Equilibrium. In a later white paper I also discussed some of Elinor Ostrom's work in a similar context. If ever there was a middle ground for policy approaches to environmental challenges her work provides a nice foundation.

See also:

Game Theory, A Foundation for Agricultural Economics

Externalities, Coase, Ostrom & Demsetz