Does Scarcity Exacerbate the Tragedy of the Commons? Evidence from Fishers´ Experimental Responses

Jorge Maldonado and Rocio Moreno-Sanchez ()

No 6006, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: Economic Experimental Games (EEGs), focused to analyze dilemmas associated with the use of common pool resources, have shown that individuals make extraction decisions that deviate from the suboptimal Nash equilibrium. However, few studies have analyzed whether these deviations towards the social optimum are affected as the stock of resource changes. Performing EEG with local fishermen, we test the hypothesis that the behavior of participants differs under a situation of abundance versus one of scarcity. Our findings show that under a situation of scarcity, players over-extract agiven resource, and thus make decisions above the Nash equilibrium; in doing so, they obtain less profit, mine the others-regarding interest, and exacerbate the tragedy of the commons. This result challenges previous findings from the EEG literature. Whenindividuals face abundance of a given resource, however, they deviate downward from the prediction of individualistic behavior. The phenomenon of private, inefficient overexploitation is corrected when management strategies are introduced into the game, something that underlines the importance of institutions.

Keywords: tragedy of the commons intensified; economic experimental games; resource abundance; resource scarcity; dynamic effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C72 C73 C93 D01 D02 D03 O13 O54 Q01 Q22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2009-11-06
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/8134/dcede2009-22.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Scarcity Exacerbate the Tragedy of the Commons? Evidence from Fishers’ Experimental Responses (2009)
Working Paper: Does scarcity exacerbate the tragedy of the commons? Evidence from fishers’ experimental responses (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:006006

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