Abstract

Existing decision support systems (DSS) do not account for forest owner heterogeneity, nor do they explicitly model the reaction of forest owners to policy. Hence, current DSS are suitable for response analysis, but much less useful for policy impact assessment or forecasting. The current study presents a theoretical model of harvesting behavior which provides the basis for a simulation model, Expected Value Asymmetries (EVA), useful for analyzing how  timber  supply  and  forest  characteristics  are  affected  when  forest  owners  differ  as  to  responsiveness  to  information, risk aversion, and patience as regards postponement of harvesting revenues. The simulation results clearly  indicate  that  the  model  is  well  adapted  for  considering  forest  owner  heterogeneity  when  assessing  the  impact of policy on the inter-temporal development of forest resources and timber market conditions. Finally, it is outlined how EVA could integrate forest owner specific harvesting behavior in an augmented Decision Support System  (DSS),  thus  addressing  the  inability  of  DSS  operational  at  pan-European  level  to  model  the  interaction  between policy and forest management decisions

Published in

Forest Research Open Access
2014, Volume: 3, number: 4, article number: 1000129

UKÄ Subject classification

Forest Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4172/21689776.1000129

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/86483