Abstract
The common-pool nature of groundwater resources creates incentives to
overpump that contribute to their rapid global depletion. In
transboundary aquifers, users are separated by a territorial border and
might face substantially different economic and hydrogeologic conditions
that can alternatively dampen or amplify incentives to overpump. We
develop a theoretical model that couples principles of game theory and
groundwater flow to capture the combined effect of well locations and
user asymmetries on pumping incentives. We find that user asymmetries in
either energy cost, groundwater profitability or aquifer response tend
to dampen incentives to overpump. However, combinations of two or more
asymmetry types can substantially amplify common-pool overdraft,
particularly when the same user simultaneously faces comparatively
higher costs (or aquifer response) and profitability. We use this
theoretical insight to interpret the emergence of the Disi agreement
between Saudi Arabia and Jordan in association with the Disi-Amman water
pipeline. By using bounded non-dimensional parameters to encode user
asymmetries and groundwater connectivity, the theory provides a
tractable generalized framework to understand the premature depletion of
shared aquifers.