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.
Highlights
Today we possess an increased understanding of how communities can successfully self-govern their common resources
We find that constraining communication has a more significant effect than limiting information on the performance of groups
The experiments were performed in an experimental laboratory at Arizona State University (ASU) on the Tempe campus
Summary
Today we possess an increased understanding of how communities can successfully self-govern their common resources. In the Maine lobster fishery rules evolved to allocate permanent spots within a bay to specific fishers (Acheson 2003; Wilson et al 2007) The map of those spots is common knowledge among the local resource users. Since trees cannot be harvested at any other date, enforcing those rules is easy since anyone who cuts at another time is breaking the rule In line with these observations, experiments reported in Janssen (2013) show that limiting the information to the resource users reduces the effectiveness of communication. Note that our analysis makes use of data from earlier experiments on limiting vision of resource users (Janssen 2013), plus new data from experiments in which we included constrained communication This allows us to test the effect of both limited information as well as constrained communication and their interactions. The paper closes with a discussion of the results and the insights we derived on the role of information and communication on governing the commons
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