Potential Disasters can Turn the Tragedy into Success

Abstract

This paper presents a novel experimental design that allows testing how users of a common-pool resource respond to an endogenously driven drastic drop in the supply of the resource. We show that user groups will manage a resource more efficiently when confronted with such a non-concave resource growth function, compared to groups facing a logistic growth function. Even among cooperative groups there is a significant behavioral difference, although theory predicts there should not be. We argue that effectiveness of communication is endogenous to the problem; the threat of reaching a critical tipping point, beyond which the growth rate will drop drastically, triggers more effective communication within the group, enabling stronger commitment for cooperation and more knowledge sharing, which together explains the results. We argue that the insights generated by this study can be seen as one of many, but nevertheless important, contributions towards an increased understanding of the interactions between human behavior and the environment in common-pool resource systems.

Collective action and the risk of ecosystem regime shifts: insights from a laboratory experiment

“…For example, the group could cooperate and maximize its joint returns, which is the optimal and most efficient outcome. Here we followed Lindahl et al (2014) and measured efficiency as the share of actual joint earnings over the maximum possible. This optimal and efficient outcome occurred if the group harvested 25 resource stock units in the first round, and thereafter 9 units per round, corresponding to the maximum sustainable yield, as long as each group member believed that the game would continue for 1 more round with sufficiently high probability.…”

“…Following Lindahl et al (2014), we formulated hypotheses, based on repeated game theory methods, to guide the analysis of the results. See Appendix 6 for the underlying intuition and proofs of hypotheses.…”

“…We continued the empirical work started by Lindahl et al (2012Lindahl et al ( , 2014 on collective action in the face of latent endogenously driven ecosystem regime shifts by introducing uncertainty or more specifically, risk, because this is a typical feature of regime shifts. Lindahl et al (2012Lindahl et al ( , 2014 investigated experimentally how user groups in a commons dilemma respond to latent endogenously driven ecosystem regime shifts by comparing two experimental treatments, one involving a simple resource dynamic without a threshold, i.e., no threshold treatment, and the other resource dynamics with an abrupt and drastic drop in resource renewal rate beyond a critical threshold in the resource stock, i.e., threshold treatment.…”

“…Lindahl et al (2012Lindahl et al ( , 2014 investigated experimentally how user groups in a commons dilemma respond to latent endogenously driven ecosystem regime shifts by comparing two experimental treatments, one involving a simple resource dynamic without a threshold, i.e., no threshold treatment, and the other resource dynamics with an abrupt and drastic drop in resource renewal rate beyond a critical threshold in the resource stock, i.e., threshold treatment. They found that groups facing a latent regime shift manage the CPR more efficiently than groups facing simple resource dynamics.…”

“…In some cases, however, Prediger et al found that groups managed the resource more carefully to avoid degradation, an effect they attributed to cultural and ecological factors the subjects face in reality. It is important to note that only three of the above-mentioned studies , Moreno-Sánchez and Maldonado 2010 permitted communication in some treatments between subjects, and only the studies by http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol20/iss1/art48/ Lindahl et al (2012Lindahl et al ( , 2014. ‡ This treatment is identical to the threshold uncertainty treatment in Schill (2012).…”