We examine the effectiveness of three democratically chosen rules that alleviate the coordination and cooperation problems inherent in collectively managed common-pool resources. In particular we investigate how rule effectiveness and rule compliance depends on the prevailing local norms and...

This paper examines whether exposure to persistent resource scarcity on the commons affects pastoralists' readiness to engage in antisocial behavior towards their fellow commons users. The region under study is divided into two areas according to exogenous variations in biomass production...

Using an experimental approach, this paper examines how scarcity of natural resources affects people’s readiness to cooperate or engage in antisocial behavior. The experiments were carried out with pastoralists from southern Namibia, whose livelihoods greatly depend on grazing availability on...

Extortive petty corruption takes place when a public official elicits small bribes from citizens for providing public services that the citizens are legally entitled to receive. We implement a novel experimental design that mimics this phenomenon and explores bottom-up approaches for its...

The commons literature increasingly recognizes the importance of contextual factors in driving collaboration in governance systems. Of particular interest are the ways in which the attributes of a resource system influence the dynamics of cooperation. While this may occur through many pathways,...

This paper analyses people's decision to snatch flowers which are marketed via the honour system. If people were to make a narrow rational choice that they would snatch the unattended flowers, the market would collapse. We find that actual payment rates vary substantially between individuals....

Informational asymmetries abound in economic decision making and often provide an incentive for deception through telling a lie or misrepresenting information. In this paper I use a cheap-talk sender-receiver experiment to show that telling the truth should be classified as deception too if the...

Within the last decades an increasing number of people practice risky sports in their leisure time. Although there exists a vast number of economic literature on risk-taking behavior, an estimation of the individual willingness to pay (WTP) for the option to exercise risk-taking is missing....

Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information between sellers and consumers that may give rise to inefficiencies, such as under- and overtreatment or market break-down. We study in a large experiment with 936 participants the determinants for efficiency in credence goods...

We study the incentives of oligoplistic firms to share private information on demand parameters. Differently from previous studies, we consider bilateral sharing agreements, by which firms commit at the ex-ante stage to truthfully share information. We show that if signals are i.i.d., then...