Negotiation in the Commons: Incorporating Field and Experimental Evidence into a Theory of Local Collective Action

This paper develops a model of community level collective action to explain the evolution of institutional solutions to social dilemmas. The assumptions of the model are based on evidence from ethnographic and experimental studies that show that the degree of excludability of a common pool resource affects agent behavior by forming the basis for an ingroup. The major predictions of the model are that members of a community will develop institutional rules to protect cooperation and that the level of cooperation will be determined endogenously by the community's rule choice. The results of a new experiment support these predictions.