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Collaborative infrastructure systems are vital for managing scarce resources, particularly where user behaviors influence system sustainability. This study examines the relationship between design of constructed water infrastructure and strategic behaviors, focusing on flood irrigation systems as an example of collaborative infrastructure. The objectives are to investigate 1) whether shared water infrastructure can be effectively modeled using the stag hunt game framework and 2) how network topology impacts the strategic stability of user cooperation. Flood irrigation relies on collective action, where users balance risks of collaboration failure against benefits of successful cooperation. This situation closely aligns with stag hunt dynamics, in which users choose between a higher-value but riskier collaborative strategy or a lower-value, safer independent option. A key challenge arises when users opt out, increasing the burden on remaining collaborators. We apply a game-theoretic model using risk dominance criteria to analyze stability across four distinct infrastructure topologies: linear, tree, bus, and star. Results identify star and bus topologies as Pareto efficient, where a bus topology offers greater economic efficiency through reduced infrastructure costs and a star topology enhances stability due to equitable distribution of influence and reduced dependencies. An agent-based simulation validates analytical findings by dynamically captures user interactions under uncertainty and showing a strong correlation with game-theoretic results. Consequently, this study confirms the applicability of stag hunt frameworks for analyzing collaborative water infrastructure and provides practical insights into how topology design can influence cooperative resilience. These findings enhance knowledge for sustainable improvement of collaborative infrastructure.
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Effects of individual strategies for resource access on collaboratively maintained irrigation infrastructure
Abstract Built infrastructure for water and energy supply, transportation, and other such services underpins human well‐being and socioeconomic development. A fundamental understanding of how infrastructure design and user strategies interact can guide important design decisions as well as policy formulation for ensuring long‐term infrastructure viability in conjunction with improved individual user benefits. In this work, an agent based model (ABM) is developed to study this issue for the specific case of irrigation canals. Cooperatively maintained irrigation canals serve essential roles in sustaining agriculture‐based economies in many regions. Canal system design can strongly affect benefits derived by distributed users, regional agricultural output, and the long‐term viability of the shared infrastructure itself. Here, an ABM is used to investigate how an option to use an independent water source interacts with canal design to affect canal maintenance cooperation and farmer income. The independent water source is stylized as a well that provides access to groundwater and represents astrategically robustdesign option; a design option that reduces the implementer's utility vulnerability to unfavorable actions by other actors. Research in other systems has demonstrated that strategically robust designs can improve both implementer utility and the probability of collaboration. The results of this research, in contrast, demonstrate that the option of individual resource access, the strategically robust design option, as represented by a well, reduces cooperative maintenance in most cases. However, wells also improve farmer income, especially for downstream farmers that are most affected by water theft.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1943433
- PAR ID:
- 10418506
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Systems Engineering
- Volume:
- 26
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1098-1241
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 874-890
- Size(s):
- p. 874-890
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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