Björn Vollan

Cooperation and the Commons

In Ethiopia, groups with a higher propensity to cooperate avoid the tragedy of the commons. Sustainably managing common natural resources, such as fisheries, water, and forests, is essential for our long-term survival. Many analysts have assumed, however, that people will maximize short-term self-benefits—for example, by cutting as much firewood as they can sell—and warned that this behavior will inevitably produce a “tragedy of the commons” (1), such as a stripped forest that no longer produces wood for anyone. But in laboratory simulations of such social dilemmas, the outcome is not always tragedy. Instead, a basic finding is that humans do not universally maximize short-term self-benefits, and can cooperate to produce shared, long-term benefits (2, 3). Similar findings have come from field studies of commonly managed resources (6–7). It has been challenging, however, to directly relate laboratory findings to resource conditions in the field, and identify the conditions that enhance cooperation. On page 961 of this issue, Rustagi et al. (8) help fill this gap. In an innovative study of Ethiopias Oromo people, they use economic experiments and forest growth data to show that groups that had a higher proportion of “conditional cooperators” were more likely to invest in forest patrols aimed at enforcing firewood collection rules—and had more productive forests. They also show that other factors, including a groups distance to markets and the quality of its leadership, influenced the success of cooperative management.

Integrating simultaneous prosocial and antisocial behavior into theories of collective action

Cooperation can coexist with antisocial behavior without undermining successful collective action. Trust and cooperation constitute cornerstones of common-pool resource theory, showing that “prosocial” strategies among resource users can overcome collective action problems and lead to sustainable resource governance. Yet, antisocial behavior and especially the coexistence of prosocial and antisocial behaviors have received less attention. We broaden the analysis to include the effects of both “prosocial” and “antisocial” interactions. We do so in the context of marine protected areas (MPAs), the most prominent form of biodiversity conservation intervention worldwide. Our multimethod approach relied on lab-in-the-field economic experiments (n = 127) in two MPA and two non-MPA communities in Baja California, Mexico. In addition, we deployed a standardized fishers’ survey (n = 544) to verify the external validity of our findings and expert informant interviews (n = 77) to develop potential explanatory mechanisms. In MPA sites, prosocial and antisocial behavior is significantly higher, and the presence of antisocial behavior does not seem to have a negative effect on prosocial behavior. We suggest that market integration, economic diversification, and strengthened group identity in MPAs are the main potential mechanisms for the simultaneity of prosocial and antisocial behavior we observed. This study constitutes a first step in better understanding the interaction between prosociality and antisociality as related to natural resources governance and conservation science, integrating literatures from social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, behavioral economics, and ecology.

Human Adaptive Behavior in Common Pool Resource Systems

Overexploitation of common-pool resources, resulting from uncooperative harvest behavior, is a major problem in many social-ecological systems. Feedbacks between user behavior and resource productivity induce non-linear dynamics in the harvest and the resource stock that complicate the understanding and the prediction of the co-evolutionary system. With an adaptive model constrained by data from a behavioral economic experiment, we show that users’ expectations of future pay-offs vary as a result of the previous harvest experience, the time-horizon, and the ability to communicate. In our model, harvest behavior is a trait that adjusts to continuously changing potential returns according to a trade-off between the users’ current harvest and the discounted future productivity of the resource. Given a maximum discount factor, which quantifies the users’ perception of future pay-offs, the temporal dynamics of harvest behavior and ecological resource can be predicted. Our results reveal a non-linear relation between the previous harvest and current discount rates, which is most sensitive around a reference harvest level. While higher than expected returns resulting from cooperative harvesting in the past increase the importance of future resource productivity and foster sustainability, harvests below the reference level lead to a downward spiral of increasing overexploitation and disappointing returns.

Weird reciprocity? A ‘within-culture across-country’ trust experiment and methodological implications

Economic experiments carried out in the computer laboratory seldom account for broader real-world contextual variables that affect humans as learning and norm-adopting individuals. The here presented ‘within-culture across-country’ design of a standard trust experiment reveals an interesting phenomenon which most probably is related to the context that people live in: South African communities expressed extremely low trust while participants from Namibia exhibited high trust, but low reciprocity, although both share the same ethnic background. The country effect between the two regions remained large even after using a matching estimator to substantiate that these differences were not driven by sample selection bias. Qualitative evidence from the study area suggests that corrupt local institutions have led to lower trust in South African communities while participants in Namibia seemingly applied a deep-rooted behavioural norm of the Nama society which they perceived to be appropriate for the exchange in the experiment.

Democracy and cooperation in commons management: experimental evidence of representative and direct democracy from community forests in Ethiopia

Abstract The authors use dynamic lab-in-the-field common pool resource experiments to investigate the role of two forms of democracy on the cooperation of forest users in Ethiopia. In this experimental setup, participants can either directly select a rule (direct democracy) or elect a leader who decides on the introduction of rules (representative democracy). These two treatments are compared with the imposition of rules and imposition of leaders. It is found that both endogenous leaders elected by the community members and endogenous rules selected by the direct involvement of the participants are more effective in promoting cooperation among the community members compared to exogenous leadership, exogenous rule imposition and the baseline scenario without any of these modifications. However, no significant difference is found between representative democracy in the election of leadership and direct democracy in the selection of rules. Leadership characteristics and behavior are further analyzed. The results underline the importance of democratic procedures.

Exchanging Land for Solidarity: Solidarity Transfers among Voluntarily Resettled and Non-resettled Land-Reform Beneficiaries

Mutual aid among villagers in developing countries is often the only means of insuring against economic shocks. We use “lab-in-the-field experiments” in Cambodian villages to study solidarity in established and newly resettled communities. Our experimental participants were part of an agricultural land-distribution project for which they signed up voluntarily. Half of our sample voluntarily resettled one and a half years before this study. Playing a version of the “solidarity game,” we identify the effect of voluntary resettlement on willingness to help anonymous fellow villagers. We find that resettled farmers transfer substantially less money to their fellow villagers than farmers who have not resettled. Our experimental results indicate greater vulnerability on the part of resettled households in the initial years after resettlement.

Self-governance and punishment: An experimental study among Namibian forest users

We use a framed field experiment to assess resource harvesting behavior and its interaction with prosocial and antisocial punishment in the Kavango woodland savannah of Namibia. We implement two treatments, one with external, centralized punishment and one with internal, decentralized punishment. Our findings suggest that institution type matters, as internal punishment is a more effective regime to discipline high harvesters compared with external punishment. We find that antisocial punishment (i.e., the sanctioning of people who cooperate by free riders) happens frequently, partly as revenge and especially in ethnically heterogeneous groups, but ultimately does not prevent cooperative self-governance.

Do campaigns featuring impact evaluations increase donations? Evidence from a survey experiment

ABSTRACT We examine whether advertising the scientific soundness of an aid project or advertising the quality of an aid organisation influences donation behaviour compared to a standard emotional appeal. Using survey experiments at three universities in Austria and Germany (n = 578), we find that average donations of 14 Euros increased by 8 Euros in the treatment group that received information indicating that the project was evaluated using a randomised controlled trial (RCT). We find no effect for advertising that the organisation has earned a seal of quality. Since the majority of non-profits have already earned such a seal, people might become sceptical if an aid agency emphasises their trustworthiness, a trait that is assumed to be a given. Our results highlight that not only aid recipients but also aid organisations can benefit from adopting rigorously evaluated projects and carrying out RCTs in terms of increased income from charitable giving.

Anti-Western Conspiracy Thinking and Expectations of Collusion: Evidence from Russia and China

Anti-Western conspiracies are frequently used by Governments to strengthen their power. We investigate the impact of conspiracy thinking on expectations of collusion among individuals in Russia and China. For this purpose, we conduct a novel laboratory experiment to measure expectations of collusion and several survey items related to conspiracy thinking. Our survey results indicate that anti-Western conspiracy thinking is widespread in both countries and correlates with distrust. We find a significant effect of anti-Western conspiracy thinking in China: Anti-Western conspiracy thinking correlates with lower expectations of collusion. We explain this result by stronger ingroup feeling emanating from the anti-Western sentiment. Our paper provides a first step in analyzing the economic implications of conspiracy thinking for society.

Mitigating Extortive Corruption? Experimental Evidence

Summary Extortive petty corruption takes place when a public official elicits small bribes from citizens for providing public services that the citizens are legally entitled to receive. We implement a novel experimental design that mimics this phenomenon and explores bottom-up approaches for its mitigation. In different setups we examine how monitoring by citizens affects public official’s tendency to demand bribes and whether citizens are more willing to engage in monitoring if they can recommend rather than report. Our results are mixed. Recommendations seem to perform better in environments with personal and repeated interactions, where reports might cause discontent and further disadvantaged treatment by public officials. In contrast, reports and the sanctions these potentially cause are more likely to deter public officials from extortive behavior in settings similar to the stranger matching protocol. Regarding citizen’s monitoring involvement, we find a strong preference for recommendations over reports, even among stranger matching treatments. Moreover, independent of the matching protocol and the endogenous monitoring mechanism, we find that agents in both roles are sensitive to monitoring and detection rate variations: public officials in their decision to demand a bribe and citizens in their decision to monitor.