Do the Number of Appropriators from the Commons Matter in Controlled Laboratory Environments?

Neil Buckley, Stuart Mestelman, Andrew Muller, Stephen Schott and Jingjing Zhang

Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University

Abstract: Many controlled laboratory experiments have shown non-binding communication among appropriators from a common pool to be an effective way to reduce over-appropriation from the commons. The controlled laboratory environments have tended to be environments with fewer than 10 participants. Recent work by Buckley et al. (2017) found that non-binding communication is not successful in reducing appropriation effort in a controlled laboratory environment with 12 participants. A conjecture was that there might be a difference between 12 participants and 8 participants (the typical number used by Ostrom et al. 1994 in their seminal work and used in many subsequent studies by others). This paper presents an environment that utilizes the CPR setting identical to that used by Buckley et al. (2017) reduces the number of appropriators from 12 to 8. Eight sessions (4 with and 4 without non-binding communication) are run using the Buckley et al. (2017) environment with 8 participants. The results suggest that the number of participants may not be an important factor in driving the differences between the impact that non-binding communication has on the Buckley et al. (2017) and Ostrom et al. (1994) environments. Alternate conjectures are presented to account for the differences.

JEL-codes: C72 C92 Q20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12 pages
Date: 2017-06-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/rsrch/papers/archive/McMasterEconWP2017-09.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mcm:deptwp:2017-09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().