Ours, Not Yours : Property-Rights, Poaching and Deterrence in Common-Pool Resources

Governments often allocate property rights to protect common-pool resources (CPR) from over-harvesting and poaching, but it is not clear if one method of allocating property rights is better than another. We use a laboratory experiment to determine whether earned or assigned property rights improve decentralized management and defense of a CPR. In our treatment, subjects competed in a real-effort task to earn the property right to a CPR. In our control, the property right was randomly allocated. We also vary the property-right holders' ("insiders'') ability to use punishment to deter non-holders ("outsiders'') who could poach the CPR. How property rights were allocated had little effect on insiders' harvest levels, but the allocation method did have a significant effect on CPR defense. We find that insiders who earned the property right were more likely to defend the CPR and impose significantly more deterrence, leading to a significant reducing in extreme poaching. However, lower levels of poaching often went unpunished under both earned and assigned rights. Our results suggest that earned property rights improve coordination to deter extreme poaching relative to assigned property rights. At the same time, we corroborate previous findings on the limited ability of decentralized groups to coordinate deterrence, suggesting that alternative approaches to protecting CPRs from poachers should be explored