Games of strategy and unintended consequences: a model with perverse outcomes of the mining sector’s crisis in Cartagena-La Unión

Abstract

This paper represents an approximation to the conflict concerning the continuity of mining activity in the area of Cartagena-La Unión, which, in 1988, prompted Sociedad Minera y Metalúrgica de Peñarroya to leave this mine-district after several decades of activity. First of all it briefly accounts for the vicissitudes of mining activity throughout the eighties, coming to the study of the events happened in 1988. In the analysis of these events a game theoretic approach is used, in order to show how the bargaining among the parts broke down and how unintended and perverse outcomes for some of the parts emerged from the system of interaction.