Tragedy of the common canal

Charles Holt, Cathleen Johnson, Courtney Mallow and Sean P. Sullivan

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper uses laboratory experiments to investigate the effects of alternative solutions to a common-pool resource with a unidirectional flow. The focus is on the comparative economic efficiency of communications, bilateral “Coasian” bargaining, auctions and price-based allocations. All treatments improve allocative efficiency relative to a baseline environment. Communication and bilateral bargaining are not generally as effective as market allocations. An exogenously imposed, optimal fee results in the greatest efficiency gain, followed by auction allocations that determine the usage fee endogenously.

Keywords: externalities; experiments; auctions; Coasian bargaining; common pool resource (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 H23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20838/1/MPRA_paper_20838.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:20838

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().