What Motivates Common Pool Resource Users? Experimental Evidence from the Field

This paper develops and tests several models of pure Nash strategies of individuals who extract from a common pool resource when they are motivated by a combination of self-interest and other motivations such as altruism, reciprocity, inequity aversion and conformism. We test whether an econometric summary of subjects’ strategies is consistent with one of these motivations using data from a series of common pool resource experiments conducted in three regions of Colombia. As expected, average extraction levels are less than that predicted by a model of pure self-interest, but are nevertheless sub-optimal. Moreover, we find that a model of conformism with monotonically increasing best response functions best describes average strategies. Our empirical results are inconsistent with models of altruism, reciprocity and inequity aversion.

[1]  E. Fehr.  A Theory of Fairness, Competition and Cooperation , 1998 .

[2]  N. Bardsley,et al.  Conformity and reciprocity in public good provision , 2005 .

[3]  U. Fischbacher,et al.  Appropriating the Commons - a Theoretical Explanation , 2001, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[4]  E. Fehr,et al.  Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity , 2000, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[5]  E. Ostrom,et al.  The Drama of the Commons , 2002 .

[6]  Elinor Ostrom,et al.  Rent dissipation in a limited-access common-pool resource: Experimental evidence , 1990 .

[7]  U. Fischbacher,et al.  Are People Conditionally Cooperative? Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment , 2001 .

[8]  Toshio Yamagishi,et al.  Motivational bases of the public goods problem. , 1986 .

[9]  U. Fischbacher,et al.  Why Social Preferences Matter - the Impact of Non-Selfish Motives on Competition, Cooperation and Incentives , 2002 .

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

[11]  J. Cárdenas,et al.  Local environmental control and institutional crowding-out. , 2000 .

[12]  N. Bardsley.  Interpersonal Interaction and Economic Theory: The Case of Public Goods , 2000 .

[13]  Joel Sobel,et al.  INTERDEPENDENT PREFERENCES AND RECIPROCITY , 2005 .

[14]  Bruno S. Frey,et al.  In a field experiment , 2004 .

[15]  Robert Kurzban,et al.  Experiments investigating cooperative types in humans: a complement to evolutionary theory and simulations. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[16]  Claudia Keser,et al.  Strategic behavior of experienced subjects in a common pool resource game , 1999, Int. J. Game Theory.

[17]  G. Harrison,et al.  Field experiments , 1924, The Journal of Agricultural Science.

[18]  Robert Sugden,et al.  Reciprocity: The Supply of Public Goods Through Voluntary Contributions , 1984 .

[19]  Mauro Gallegati,et al.  Beyond the representative agent , 1999 .

[20]  J. Henrich.  Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation , 2004 .

[21]  S. Komorita,et al.  Reciprocity and the induction of cooperation in social dilemmas , 1992 .

[22]  Robert S. Baron,et al.  The forgotten variable in conformity research: Impact of task importance on social influence. , 1996 .

[23]  Bart J. Wilson,et al.  Incremental Commitment and Reciprocity in a Real-Time Public Goods Game , 2001 .

[24]  Rachel T. A. Croson.  Theories of Commitment, Altruism and Reciprocity: Evidence from Linear Public Goods Games , 2007 .

[25]  John H. Miller,et al.  Rational Cooperation in the Finitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma: Experimental Evidence , 1993 .

[26]  Paul A. Bell,et al.  Conformity as a Determinant of Behavior in a Resource Dilemma , 1994 .

[27]  B. Frey,et al.  Social Comparisons and Pro-social Behavior: Testing "Conditional Cooperation" in a Field Experiment , 2004 .

[28]  Steven D. Levitt,et al.  What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World , 2007 .

[29]  Timothy M. Waring,et al.  Article in Press Evolution and Human Behavior Xxx (2005) Xxx – Xxx , 2022 .

[30]  R Boyd,et al.  Why people punish defectors. Weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas. , 2001, Journal of theoretical biology.

[31]  Gary Bornstein,et al.  Cooperation in Intergroup and Single-Group Social Dilemmas , 1994 .

[32]  Psychology, rationality and economic behaviour : challenging standard assumptions , 2005 .

[33]  David M. Kreps,et al.  Rational cooperation in the finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma , 1982 .

[34]  Colin Camerer,et al.  “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies , 2005, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[35]  James C. Cox,et al.  How to identify trust and reciprocity , 2004, Games Econ. Behav..

[36]  E. Ostrom,et al.  Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources , 1994 .

[37]  R. Cornes,et al.  On Commons and Tragedies , 1983 .

[38]  Jeffrey P. Carpenter,et al.  When in Rome: conformity and the provision of public goods , 2004 .

[39]  T. Luzzati.  Economic Theory and Conformism , 1999 .

[40]  E. Ostrom,et al.  WHAT DO PEOPLE BRING INTO THE GAME: EXPERIMENTS IN THE FIELD ABOUT COOPERATION IN THE COMMONS , 2004 .

[41]  D. Levine.  Modeling Altruism and Spitefulness in Experiments , 1998 .

[42]  Samuel Bowles,et al.  Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution , 2003 .

[43]  Gary E. Bolton,et al.  ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition , 2000 .

[44]  B. Frey,et al.  Motivation Crowding Theory: A Survey of Empirical Evidence , 2000, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[45]  P Ekins,et al.  The Drama of the Commons - Ostrom, E., Dietz, T., Dolsak, N., Stern, P., Stonich, S. & Weber, E. (Eds.), National Academy Press, Washington DC (Review) , 2004 .

[46]  Charles R. Plott,et al.  Decentralized management of common property resources: experiments with a centuries-old institution , 2003 .