Elinor Ostrom's contributions to the experimental study of social dilemmas

摘要

The second author vividly remembers dashing into Lin Ostrom's office in 1980 and asking her about using experiments. Wilson was looking for a dissertation topic and was in the middle of a pilot observational study on the provisioning of public goods. He was frustrated by the fact that he couldn't find enough institutional variation to test key conjectures about how institutional rules affected behavior. He stumbled on a working paper by Plott (1981) who argued that experiments were a great way to test for institutional variation because the experimenter could design those institutions. It was a eureka moment for Wilson. He asked Lin "did she know this Plott guy and what did she think about experiments?" Lin, as always, was enthusiastic. She knew Plott, she knew about experiments, but she wondered whether Wilson had a question worth asking. When it seemed there was a glimmer of an idea, she indicated that experiments might be a useful method for addressing the question. In her usual low key manner she gave Wilson a lengthy reading list and pressed him to go visit a brand new assistant professor who had just been hired in economics-Arlington Williams.