Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment / CBIE Working Papers / The Effect of Constrained Communication and Limited Information in Governing a Common Resource

The Effect of Constrained Communication and Limited Information in Governing a Common Resource

CBIE_WP-2013-012

Abstract

Allowing resource users to communicate in behavioral 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 signicant effect than limiting information on the performance of groups.

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Published October 7, 2013

Marco A. Janssen, Arizona State University, School of Sustainability

Madeline Tyson, Arizona State University, School of Sustainability

Allen Lee, Arizona State University, Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment