Team:HZAU-China/eco/1

     Thirty years after Paul Berg—the father of genetic engineering—first made the suggestion that bio-scientists should explore potential hazards of their work[1], the regulation and legislation processes about GMOs seem to be keeping up just fine.[2] However, despite the regulation and legislation that GMOs are subject to, GMOs are still met with global resistances that range from underlying doubts and outright boycotts that have landed scientists and the general public on antagonistic sides.

     Considering Zimbabwe who rejected GMO food aid in the early 2000s[3], China’s GMO fiasco where debate between camps con and pro has mounted to new heights in recent years which is described by the PheonixNet as, ``probably the fiercest GMO debate in the current world'' in 2013 [4][5], and the EU-US trade impasse over GM corps[6], one would say that genetically modified products still have a long way to go before claiming its commercialization rights, rightfully or not.

     When it comes to whether GMOs should be used at all, any opinion fundamentally belongs with either pro or con, and the clash of view is vicious. The scientists’ camp generally sneers at the general public under the facade of ``education'' and ``clarification'' for their unscientific stubbornness, and the general public who seem to draw odd inspirations from everywhere sneers back at their insulting patience to ``educate'' and would not relent whatsoever—just take a glimpse at the responses in various online debate websites [7], media [8], or the surveys done in different countries and areas [9][10][11][12]. Pros and cons— each side thinks it knows better from an objective point of view, but in fact, is it, really? Subconsciously we all are taking a stand from either side so we could hardly remain objective as a person [13], for this is a picture that involves the welfare of us all so it’s hard to remain a bystander be it a researcher or a layman. It’s either pro or con, safe or unsafe, and the conditional middle ground might eventually have to, or come to choose a side.

     Former teams have looked into the cause of this confliction that never seems to settle, giving out insightful ethical and philosophical explanations. Team Manchester2013 analyzed the public’s attitudes to science and picked the flaws of the knowledge deficit theory [14]. Team Paris2009 did a fairly comprehensive investigation of many commonly used concepts in synthetic biology and presented some brilliant discussions [15]. Their works is marvelous and thought-provoking, and thanks to works like this, the ethical dimension of synthetic biology has been thriving, and more and more complex problems get to surface.

     In this report, however, we would like to try a different approach from the previous teams by borrowing game theory from economics to analyze the tradeoffs of the stakeholders in the GMO market.

     When science meets the market, it tends to abide by the rules of the market, for the market has its own science that refuses to be dictated. The market is like a chess game, each of us is a piece on the board. The moment we encounter each other, we enter a game of decision which we want to be at the winning side of, and all behaviors are viewed as different kinds of tradeoffs for different kinds of maximum profit, moral imperative or not. The difference is that, in a chess game someone always loses, while in the market we might both win, or lose.

     Game theory in economics is often used to analyze human behaviors that are related to tradeoffs [16]. It has the advantage of allowing the analyzing of the influencers of a subject once at a time which in this report will be the safety conditions.

     The GMO market has been intensively researched by previous economists. Charles Lawson listed the situations of information asymmetry in GMO market under the Gene Technology Act 2000[17]; McCluskey and Swinnen studied how the media was influencing the supply and demand sides of the GMO market by influencing people’s perception [18]; Myhr and Traavik studied the conflicts of interest and the issue of trust between different stakeholders in the GMO market [19], Gregory A. Baker and Thomas A. Burnham proved the existence of market segment of GMO according to consumer responses [21], etc.

     However, among economists, their personal attitudes towards GMO vary. As long as their essays gave out policy advices somewhere in the article, their own attitudes towards GMOs can be exposed. Although the economic essay should always speak with a neutral tone on the paper, the economists are not necessarily so in their own homes. Some advices are given under the subconscious assumption that GMOs can be perfectly innocuous, others are given under the subconscious assumption that GMOs cannot. If you read the lines quite carefully, you find their real personal sentiments towards this perhaps not so new technology. (For further probing of this skeptic attitude, please read the article in the section of Humanities and Ethics: Ethics: One Psychological Origin of the Synthetic Biology Ethics)

     And after reading some of their account and advices of the GMO market, I found to my astonishment that those accounts and advices given regarding the GMO market are fundamentally flawed in that they all suggest a basic personal taste or distaste towards GMOs. What I’m implying is NOT that economists shouldn’t have a personal taste, but that this personal taste can and in some cases have already, biased their account of the GMO market condition.

     A government needs to take a stand, but an independent researcher is not speaking for any government so he or she doesn’t need to. In this report, I only want to give a description of the four types of markets that GMOs could end up in with as much objectivity as I could manage, and explain why some policies given regarding to GMO markets are fundamentally biased.

     Many scholars have described GMO as a failing market. For example, Donat, Kim JoDene asserted that the current GMO market was in its failure state, and brought up three reasons that might have caused the failure [20]. I heartily agreed with him at the beginning because the essay was so well researched and I learned a lot from it. But after sifting through various surveys done by different parties to look into consumers’ attitudes of GMOs across the globe, I had to think differently on one issue: for why should the refusal of Zimbabwe to accept GMOs and the reluctance of EU to release restrictions on GMOs be called ``market failure'' (despite what other motives the trade barrier might have) if the basic assumptions of the analytical outline is flawed despite the fitness of parameters? However, I agree that the market should be discussed separately as Xie Shiyu in Fudan University has written in his book Game Theory in Economics [22] so we will start by building the outline in which the phrase ``market failure'' stands.