Understanding an economic dilemma: Essays on common property resources.

摘要

There are many economic environments in which individual incentives do not generate enough group cooperation. This dissertation investigates, from three distinct perspectives, one such social dilemma—the use of a common property resource—and a special class of solutions, namely self-governing institutions.; In the first essay, game theory and the economics of property rights are applied to a field case study concerning the collective use of renewable resources. For six centuries, many communities in the Italian Alps managed their common forests and pastures through contracts negotiated and enforced among themselves (Carte di Regola). This legal solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is compared with the potential for informal cooperation through repeated interaction (Folk theorem). The two solutions are found to often be complementary rather than alternative.; In the second essay, a simplified version of the decentralized monitoring and sanctioning mechanism devised historically to enforce regulations on the commons is studied experimentally. Individual users were allowed to inspect others at their own cost and to impose a predetermined fine when a free rider was discovered. The fine was paid to the inspector. We find that; first, this mechanism considerably improves efficiency of resource use, and, second, that the model of other-regarding preferences with altruism and spite better explains the data than the classical model with identical, selfish agents.; Finally, an alternative explanation of the above experimental data is given by using selfish agents with bounded rationality. Simulations are carried out using a version of genetic algorithms with memory sets. We find that most aspects of the data with human agents are replicated, and new predictions are made. Interestingly, in this computational study, less sophisticated adaptive agents exhibit a higher degree of individual heterogeneity. In addition, the impact of the process that generates new ideas is explored by comparing the conventional uniform binary mutation with two other alternatives.