Institutional choice vs communication in social dilemmas – an experimental approach

This paper presents an experimental study that compares the ability of human groups to escape the tragedy of the commons through institutional change or communication. Teams of five players are placed in a dynamic CPR environment with inefficient institutional settings. The results clearly show the vital importance of communication. At the same time, the groups who were allowed to replace the inefficient institutional settings by other more appropriate rules performed worse than those groups who were not given this opportunity.

[1]  D. Messick,et al.  Alternative structural solutions to resource dilemmas , 1986 .

[2]  J. Kagel,et al.  Handbook of Experimental Economics , 1997 .

[3]  Charles A. Holt,et al.  Experimental Economics: Methods, Problems, and Promise , 1993 .

[4]  T. Palfrey,et al.  Anomalous Behavior in Public Goods Experiments: How Much and Why? , 1997 .

[5]  J. Carpenter.  Negotiation in the Commons: Incorporating Field and Experimental Evidence into a Theory of Local Collective Action , 2000 .

[6]  B. Vollan.  Socio-ecological explanations for crowding-out effects from economic field experiments in southern Africa , 2008 .

[7]  G. Marwell,et al.  Experiments on the Provision of Public Goods. I. Resources, Interest, Group Size, and the Free-Rider Problem , 1979, American Journal of Sociology.

[8]  R. Thaler.  Quasi Rational Economics , 1991 .

[9]  E. Ostrom,et al.  Covenants with and without a Sword: Self-Governance Is Possible , 1992, American Political Science Review.

[10]  James M. Walker,et al.  Group size and the voluntary provision of public goods : Experimental evidence utilizing large groups , 1994 .

[11]  Sidney C. Sufrin,et al.  The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. , 1966 .

[12]  A. van Witteloostuijn,et al.  The impact of personality on behavior in five Prisoner's Dilemma games , 1999 .

[13]  R. Heltberg.  Property Rights and Natural Resource Management in Developing Countries , 2002 .

[14]  G. Brady.  Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action , 1993 .

[15]  R. Mark Isaac,et al.  Divergent evidence on free riding: An experimental examination of possible explanations , 1984 .

[16]  J. Andreoni.  Cooperation in Public-Goods Experiments: Kindness or Confusion? , 1995 .

[17]  Joachim Weimann,et al.  Individual behaviour in a free riding experiment , 1994 .

[18]  Kaori Sato.  Distribution of the cost of maintaining common resources , 1987 .

[19]  R. Selten,et al.  Experimental Evidence for Attractions to Chance , 2000 .

[20]  Rajiv Sethi,et al.  The Evolution of Social Norms in Common Property Resource Use , 1996 .

[21]  James J. Murphy,et al.  Processing Data from Social Dilemma Experiments: A Bayesian Comparison of Parametric Estimators , 2007 .

[22]  David M. Messick,et al.  INDIVIDUAL AND STRUCTURAL SOLUTIONS TO RESOURCE DILEMMAS IN 2 CULTURES , 1984 .

[23]  L. Wheeler,et al.  Review of personality and social psychology , 1980 .

[24]  Charles R. Plott,et al.  The Groves-Ledyard mechanism: An experimental study of institutional design , 1996 .

[25]  J. Brosig.  Identifying cooperative behavior: some experimental results in a prisoner's dilemma game , 2002 .

[26]  Elinor Ostrom,et al.  Collective Choice in the Commons: Experimental Results on Proposed Allocation Rules and Votes , 2000 .

[27]  J. Zelmer.  Linear Public Goods Experiments: A Meta-Analysis , 2003 .

[28]  Testing the long-run implications of the neoclassical stochastic growth model: A panel-based unit root investigation for west german länder, 1970–1994 , 1999 .

[29]  M. Olson,et al.  The Logic of Collective Action , 1965 .

[30]  E. Fehr,et al.  Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments , 1999, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[31]  R. Gardner,et al.  Governing a Groundwater Commons: A Strategic and Laboratory Analysis of Western Water Law , 1997 .

[32]  J. Ledyard.  Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research , 1994 .