Motivational Levers for the Preservation of an Intergenerational Common Resource: An Experiment

Ivan Ajdukovic (), Eli Spiegelman and Angela Sutan ()
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Ivan Ajdukovic: BSB - Burgundy School of Business (BSB) - ESC Dijon-Bourgogne, CEREN - Centre de Recherche sur les Entreprises - BSB - Burgundy School of Business (BSB) - ESC Dijon-Bourgogne
Angela Sutan: ESSEC Business School

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Abstract: Preserving natural resources for future generations lies at the heart of sustainable development practices, and is yet difficult to motivate for a self-interested present. We propose a laboratory experiment investigating collective motivations for resource conservation in intergenerational CPRs. We apply three behavioral levers. First, we generate intertemporal communities composed of members distributed across cohorts (V-Links). Second, we introduce a tax on overextraction that does not change material incentives but signals conditional cooperation intentions. Finally, we implement a savings technology that improves the resource's resilience to future extractive shocks. We draw on the philosophical literature of collective motivations, connecting extractors to social constructs larger than themselves. Empirically, we find that each lever succeeds in improving coordination in the CPR game. This is useful because it implies that intertemporal links can be replaced by direct conditional cooperation connections with the current generation or by the salience of the resource itself, both of which might be easier to establish. We also find that in the presence of the intertemporal link, the other levers are not necessary, which suggests, for policy, that targeting one lever might be more effective than trying to activate several.

Keywords: CPR experiment; collective motivations; intergenerational equity; environment; common resource (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05631334v1
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Published in Ecological Economics, 2025, 230, pp.108523. ⟨10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108523⟩

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Journal Article: Motivational levers for the preservation of an intergenerational common resource: An experiment (2025)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05631334

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108523

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