Comparing Regulations to Protect the Commons: An Experimental Investigation

Abstract

In a laboratory experiment we test three regulations imposed on a common-pool resource game with heterogeneous users: an access fee and subsidy scheme, transferable quotas and non-transferable quotas. We calibrate the game so that all regulations improve users’ profits compared to free-access extraction. We compare the regulations according to five criteria: resource preservation, individual profits, profit difference, Pareto-improvement from free-access and sorting of the most efficient users. One of the main findings is that, even though it performs better in sorting out the most efficient subjects, the fee and subsidy scheme is not more profitable than tradable quotas

Nonrenewable Resources, Strategic Behavior and the Hotelling Rule: An Experiment

“…5 In environmental economics, experiments have been used to study social dilemmas, provide a test bed for institutional solutions to environmental problems, and to obtain environmental valuations (see e.g., Ambec et al . [2014]; Braaten et al . [2015]; Jakob et al .…”

Clean up your own mess: An experimental study of moral responsibility and efficiency

“…An early tradition in experimental economics emphasizes that people tend to be more cooperative than predicted by standard economic theory (Mason and Phillips 1997;Casari and Plott 2003), thereby alleviating collective action problems and affecting optimal policy. More recent studies focus on the performance of classic policy instruments in terms of environmental effectiveness and economic efficiency (e.g., Ambec et al 2014). Relatedly, field experiments have been employed to develop and test policy instruments when consumers respond to social information (Allcott and Rogers, 2014) or are biased (Allcott and Taubinsky, 2015).…”

Agro-exportación y sobreexplotación del acuífero de Ica en Perú

“…El resultado puede ser, entonces, la sobrexplotación del acuífero, dado que este no es ilimitado. Luego, para enfrentar el problema del deterioro del recurso común existen por lo menos dos alternativas estudiadas, una es la regulación (Grafton, 2000;Ambec et al, 2009) y otra alternativa es la autorregulación (López-Gunn y Martínez-Cortina, 2006). En ambos casos la aplicación de incentivos selectivos adecuados es fundamental para el logro del objetivo.…”