Abstract
Common pool resources frequently give rise to social dilemmas in which individuals have to choose whether they would overexploit the common good to maximise their short-term personal returns or whether they would refrain from doing so for the sake of the long-term social benefit and the sustainability of the resource. This chapter used a laboratory experiment to explore this in Greece, and to assess whether subjects, by communicating with each other, manage to cooperate and to form institutions that overcome the commons’ tragedy. For this purpose, three experiment sessions were undertaken with 77 final-year undergraduates in economics. The game was played in eight rounds, where every two the rules were slightly different. The study recorded the decisions (and earnings) of the subjects in each round, examining whether, under different communication conditions, they would refrain from personal maximisation towards the sustainable use of the resource. It was found that individuals in commons dilemmas are not always confined to their narrow self-interest, but that small-group, face-to-face communication enables them to articulate cooperation-facilitating institutions and achieve outcomes that are almost socially efficient.
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Notes
- 1.
Note, that during the first six rounds, subjects did not know the individual decisions of the others in the group; they were informed only of the total aggregate extraction of their group.
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Arvanitidis, P., Nasioka, F. (2018). From Commons Dilemmas to Social Solutions: A Common Pool Resource Experiment in Greece. In: Vliamos, S., Zouboulakis, M. (eds) Institutionalist Perspectives on Development. Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98494-0_8
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