Developing Practical Measures of the Price of Pesticide Resistance: A Flexible Computational Framework with Global Sensitivity Analysis

Paper abstract: Pesticide resistance poses an increasing challenge foragricultural sustainability. Pesticide susceptibility is adepletable biological resource, but resistance managementrarely quantifies marginal, forward‐looking economiccosts to users of depletion. To facilitate the developmentof such costs, we use a generic stochastic bioeconomicmodel of resistance evolution in a crop pest population,stochastic dynamic programming, and global sensitivityanalysis to analyze the “marginal user costs” of resistance.The most impactful parameters are population densitydependence and pesticide prices. The least impactful isthe fitness cost of resistance, which is noteworthy becauseof prior emphasis on this parameter in the resistancemanagement literature.