The Social and Ecological Determinants of Common Pool Resource Sustainability

We study a novel, repeated common pool resource game in which current resource stocks depend on resource extraction in previous periods. Our model shows that for a sufficiently high regrowth rate, there is no commons dilemma: the resource will be preserved indefinitely in equilibrium. Lower growth rates lead to depletion. Laboratory tests of the model indicate that favorable ecological characteristics are necessary but insufficient to encourage effective CPR governance. However, using a method developed in Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2013), we identify behavioral types ex ante by observing individual willingness to follow a costly rule, and we show that assortative matching on type facilitates CPR management.