Cooperation or Conflict in Common Pools

Ingela Ternström ()
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Ingela Ternström: Dept. of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics, Postal: Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, SE-113 83 Stockholm, Sweden

No 428, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: Many of the world's common pool resources are located in poor countries, where consumption levels may be low enough to adversely affect the users' health. Under these circumstances, an agent's utility function may be described as an S-shaped function of consumption. Using non-cooperative game theory, very poor groups of users are shown to have lower probability of cooperative management of common pool resources than groups with adequate consumption levels. However, users that are only moderately poor have the greatest chance for cooperation. For this group, if resource productivity varies, cooperation may break down in periods of low productivity. The theoretical results concur with empirical evidence of cooperation in common pool resources.

Keywords: Common pool resource; developing countries; dynamic game; irrigation; natural resource; non-linear utility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 O13 Q15 Q25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2001-01-25, Revised 2001-02-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hastef:0428

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