Abstract:Allowing resource users to communicate in behavioural experiments on commons dilemmas increases the level of cooperation. In actual common pool resource dilemmas in the real world, communication is costly, which is an important detail missing from most typical experiments. We conducted experiments where participants must give up harvesting opportunities to communicate. The constrained communication treatment is compared with the effect of limited information about the state of the resource and the actions of the other participants. We find that despite making communication costly, performance of groups improves in all treatments with communication. We also find that constraining communication has a more significant effect than limiting information on the performance of groups.

In the study of common-pool resource (CPR) governance, frameworks provide a metatheoretical language to describe system states, dynamics, elements, and relationships. The coding manuals which accompany CPR frameworks-in addition to providing guidelines for connecting empirical case work to conceptual variables-define a vocabulary of coding questions. For empirical work, connecting variables and coding questions with framework elements contributes to conceptual advance. In the process of analysis and publication, it is tempting to offer a novel framework without also developing, applying, or modifying the foundational questions and variables of coding manuals buttressing said frameworks. However, if the scholarly community is to generate robust knowledge for the study of CPR dilemmas, we must provide the underlying work of comparing across frameworks. In this paper, we report on one way the community might conduct such comparisons. We present results and challenges of using a group consensus process to link the more than 450 coding questions derived from the original Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IADF) to the recently proposed Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework (CISF). Despite overlap, discrepancies in the conceptual positions of the IADF and CISF suggest a need to modify or create new coding variables related to concepts of system boundaries, externalities, cross-scale interactions, multi-functionality, and technological change. We suggest that such work needs provisioning if commons scholars are to navigate the continued challenges of tailoring frameworks and coding manuals to evolving CPR governance dilemmas.

Abstract:Allowing resource users to communicate in behavioural experiments on commons dilemmas increases the level of cooperation. In actual common pool resource dilemmas in the real world, communication is costly, which is an important detail missing from most typical experiments. We conducted experiments where participants must give up harvesting opportunities to communicate. The constrained communication treatment is compared with the effect of limited information about the state of the resource and the actions of the other participants. We find that despite making communication costly, performance of groups improves in all treatments with communication. We also find that constraining communication has a more significant effect than limiting information on the performance of groups.