Humanity's problem with climate change has been likened to a "tragedy of the commons". If the atmosphere is seen as an open access dump for gasses like CO2 or methane, Garret Hardin's conclusion from 1968: "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all" is obviously correct. But how do we create a...

We study quantity and price competition in heterogeneous triopoly markets where two firms are commonly owned by institutional shareholders, whereas the third firm is owned by independent shareholders. With such a mixed ownership structure, the common owners have an incentive to coordinate their...

Most studies on common-pool resource usage focus on situations in which actors are in symmetric positions when they use the resource. Many real-world cases do not fit this scenario because users are in asymmetric positions regarding their ability to benefit from the resource. Examples range from...

In this paper, we propose an evaluative framework to analyse Commons governance situations that use blockchain-based governance tools. Our research builds on a relatively recent field of literature linking the work of Elinor Ostrom and blockchain-based governance and unifies different strands to...

The National Park Service and other agencies have argued that our recreation lands face a crisis of deferred maintenance. This paper evaluates two proposals for funding public lands, increasing gate fees and taxing recreational gear. It analyzes the joint welfare effects of such taxes and the...

Natural Resource Management is affected the by the varied roles of institutions, and importantly, by the process of decentralization which has been adopted by many developing countries like Bangladesh, where the existing resource management system is complex and politicized. This study...

Commons governance is complex and polycentric, involving a range of actors, working at different scales with different concepts of ‘development’, and different types of power. Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) have generated considerable attention as a way to address these tensions among...

American local governments own and manage a wide portfolio of enterprises, including gas and electricity companies, water systems, subways, bus systems and schools. Existing theories of public ownership, including the presence of natural monopolies, can explain much of the observed municipal...

Common resources may be managed with inefficient policies for the sake of equity. We study how rationing the commons shapes the efficiency and equity of resource use, in the context of agricultural groundwater use in Rajasthan, India. We find that rationing binds on input use, such that farmers,...

This paper studies why scientific forecasts regarding exceptional or rare events generally fail to trigger adequate public response. A major example is climate change: despite years of scientific reporting, public acceptance of economic regulations is still limited. Building on the main causes...

Common pool resources (CPRs) are usually exploited one generation after another - often overexploited - meaning there is an intergenerational link between the consumers - e.g., water for farming activities. This key dimension is often not considered in theoretical or field experiments, due to...

New-build gated condominiums at the periphery of a post-socialist city are a well-studied phenomenon. However, in Poland, recent years have seen an expansion of residential gating into old inner-city neighbourhoods and socialist large housing estates. The resulting fragmentation and...

I examine the relationship between democracy and the perceived risk of corruption in a panel of 130 countries. My panel model controls for country fixed effects and enables the estimation of a within-country relationship between democracy and corruption. My main finding is that democracy...

In this study, we argue that while community forest management is effective in protecting forest resources as argued by Ostrom, it may fail to provide proper incentives to take care of such resources because of collective sharing of benefits of forest management. This study proposes a mixed...

This paper studies the standard version of the approval mechanism with two players in a common pool resource (CPR) extraction game. In the case of disapproval, the Nash extraction level is implemented. The paper investigates, experimentally, the extent to which the Nash threat leads to...

Water is an increasingly scarce resource. It is often distributed such that consumers do not face any marginal cost of consumption, creating a common pool problem. For instance, tenants in multi-family buildings can often consume both hot and cold water at zero marginal cost. Using...

International cooperation on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, disarmament, or free trade needs to be negotiated. The success of such negotiations depends on how they are designed. In the context of international climate change policy, it has been proposed [e.g., Weitzman J of the...

This study combines three interconnected streams in tourism literature: analysis of the utilisation of common pool resources (CPR) in tourism, studies on sustainable tourism development and theoretical contributions to the articulation of roles, missions and strategies of a destination...

We propose a five-player common-pool resource (CPR) game with endogenous coalition formation. We show that the level of extraction from the CPR depends on the size of each coalition that is formed and on the final coalition structure. These predictions are tested in a laboratory experiment. We...

We consider trade between a consumer' country with an open access renewable resource and a conservationist' country that regulates resource harvesting to maximize domestic steady-state utility. In what we call the mild overuse' case, the consumer country exports the resource good and suffers...

This work shows that defective behaviors from the cooperative equilibrium in the management of common resources can be fueled and triggered by the presence of agents with myopic behaviors. The behavior implemented by naïve agents, even if performed with cooperative intent, can activate a...

Most of the world’s natural resources can be found on the territories of indigenous peoples. This puts indigenous peoples in a position where they are not only subjected to environmental hazards as a result of the mining and exploitation of these resources, but are also denied the use and...

In the paper it is argued that bridging the digital divide may cause a new ethical and social dilemma. Using Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, we show that an improper opening and enlargement of the digital environment (Infosphere) is likely to produce a Tragedy of the Digital Commons (TDC). In...

Common property arrangements have long been considered inefficient and short lived, since they encourage high-productivity individuals to leave and shirking among those who stay. In contrast, kibbutzim | voluntary common property settlements in Israel | have lasted almost a century. Recently,...

Executive summary:Traditional economic models of how to manage environmental problems relating to renewable natural resources, such as fisheries, have tended to recommend either government regulation or privatisation and the explicit definition of property rights.These traditional models ignore...

When confronted with market weaknesses and failures determining sustainability problems for environmental common-pool resources, economic analysis has proposed government intervention as the only alternative available. Elinor Ostrom showed that this dichotomy between market and government is not...

In this paper we show that a simple model of reciprocal preferences explains major experimental regularities of common pool resource (CPR) experiments. The evidence indicates that in standard CPR games without communication and without sanctioning possibilities inefficient excess appropriation...

India has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the context of a larger quasi-experimental impact assessment, we assess the pandemic’s effects on coping behavior in 80 villages spread across four districts and three states (n=772). Half of these villages were targeted by a largescale...

Classic theories suggest that common pool resources are subject to overexploitation. Community-based resource management approaches may ameliorate “tragedy of the commons” effects. Using a randomized evaluation in Namibia’s communal rangelands, we find that a comprehensive four-year...

Water is an increasingly scarce resource. It is often distributed such that consumers do not face any marginal cost of consumption, creating a common pool problem. For instance, tenants in multi-family buildings can often consume both hot and cold water at zero marginal cost. Using...

We develop a theory of resource management where the degree to which countries escape the tragedy of the commons is endogenously determined and explicitly linked to changes in world prices and other possible effects of market integration. We show how changes in world prices can move some...