Developing practical measures of the price of pesticide resistance: A flexible computational framework with global sensitivity analysis

Pesticide resistance poses an increasing challenge for agricultural sustainability. Pesticide susceptibility is a depletable biological resource, but resistance management rarely quantifies marginal, forward-looking economic costs to users of depletion. To facilitate the development of such costs, we use a generic stochastic bioeconomic model of resistance evolution in a crop pest population, stochastic dynamic programming, and global sensitivity analysis to analyze the “marginal user costs” of resistance. The most impactful parameters are population density dependence and pesticide prices. The least impactful is the fitness cost of resistance, which is noteworthy because of prior emphasis on this parameter in the resistance management literature.