Behavioral Modelling in a Decision Support System

Considering the variety of attitudes, objectives and behaviors characterizing forestowners is crucial for accurately assessing the impact of policy and market drivers on forestresources. A serious shortcoming of existing pan-European Decision Support Systems (DSS) is that they do not account for such heterogeneity, consequently disregarding the effects that this might have on timber supply and forestdevelopment. Linking a behavioral harvesting decision model—Expected Value Asymmetries (EVA)—to a forestresource dynamics model—European Forestry Dynamics Model (EFDM)—we provide an example of how forestowner specific characterization can be integrated in a DSS. The simulation results indicate that the approach holds promise as regards accounting for forestowner behavior in simulations of forestresources development. Hence, forestowner heterogeneity makes the distribution of forestland on owner types non-trivial, as it affects harvesting intensity and, subsequently, inter-temporal forestdevelopment.