The paper discusses the link between commons as they might have been used in prehistoric Norway and the rules concerning the exploitation of the commons as found in the oldest known legislation for regions of Norway, Gulating Law and Frostating Law. One clear social dilemma has been identified:...

We develop a dynamic model of the exploitation of an environmental resource with endogenous property rights. We are able to explain both the evolution of property rights and environmental quality. In some circumstances the time path of environmental quality is U-shaped and resembles an...

We study the effect of environmental risk on the extraction of a common resource. Using a dynamic and non-cooperative game in which an environmental event impacts the renewability and the quality of the resource, we show that the anticipation of such an event has an ambiguous effect on...

We model a dynamic common property resource game with unobservable actions and non-linear stock-dependent costs. We propose a strategy profile that generates a worst perfect equilibrium in the punishment phase, thereby supporting cooperation under the widest set of conditions. We show under what...

We evaluate the effectiveness of non optimal and temporally inconsistent incentive policies for regulating the exploitation of a renewable common-pool resource. The corresponding game is an N-person discrete-time deterministic dynamic game of T periods fixed duration. Three policy instruments...

This paper revisits the debate about communal management of natural resources and brings together various issues confronting it. Much of the criticism against common property regimes stems from an incorrect modeling of a common property situation, and misunderstandings about the terms and their...

A tragedy of the commons appears when the users of a common resource have incentives to exploit it more than the socially efficient level. We analyze the situation when the tragedy of the commons is embedded in a network of users and sources. Users play a game of extractions, where they decide...

This paper reconsiders evidence from experimental common pool resource games from the perspective of a model of payoff sampling. Despite being parameter-free, the model is able to replicate some striking features of the data, including single-peaked frequency distributions, the persistent use of...

A fundamental problem for an economy based on a common property resource is the absence of a market to trade the resource. This implies that private costs are below social costs. This paper investigates possible government interventions that correct for such distortions in a neoclassical growth...