Published as:"The Nature of Common-Pool Resource Problems," Rationality and Society 2(3), July 1990, 335-358."A large, multidisciplinary literature focuses on the problems occurring when multiple individuals concurrently use common-pool resources such as fisheries, grazing areas, airsheds, oil...

Using experimental methods to test a game theoretic model of destruction in a common pool resource environment, this paper investigates whether the possibility of destruction will significantly alter choice behavior in the resulting game. When there is a nonnegligible probability of destruction...