Abstract: Tarim River is one of the longest inland rivers in China and even in the world. The mainstream of the Tarim River was fed by its all nine headstreams in history. However, the headstreams were decreased to 4 in recent 50 years with the rapid population growth and artificial oasis enlargement, and the discharge of the mainstream of the Tarim River was also reduced sharply and continuously. The contradiction between supply and demand of water resources has become more serious, and a series of water environment problems occurred in the Tarim River Basin. These problems restricted seriously the social and economic development in the Tarim River Basin, and water crisis was exacerbated by water supply-demand contradiction. Fundamentally, the increasing water problems in the drainage basin are the game results of various stakeholders considering from their own interests. In this paper, a game model was developed and used to find out and analyze the contradiction in redistributing water resources under the imperfect initial water rights, the incentive and regulating mechanisms were developed for water consumption, and some safeguard measures were put forward from the administrative, legal, economic and technological aspects so as to ensure the successful implementation of the mechanisms. The purpose of developing the mechanisms is to shift the redistribution of water resources from the non-cooperative game to cooperative game, alleviate the conflicts between the individual interests sand collective interests, which are very important for sustainable development, utilization and management of water resources in the Tarim River Basin.

Key words: redistribution of water resources, game theory, oasis area, sustainable utilization, Tarim River Basin