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Journal ArticleDOI

A field study on cooperativeness and impatience in the Tragedy of the Commons

TL;DR: In this article, the role of cooperativeness and impatience in the exploitation of common pool resources (CPRs) was examined by combining laboratory experiments with field data, and it was shown that fishermen who exhibit more cooperative and less impatient behavior in the laboratory should be less likely to exploit the CPR, which their findings confirm.
About: This article is published in Journal of Public Economics.The article was published on 2011-10-01 and is currently open access. It has received 262 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Cooperativeness & Common-pool resource.

Summary (3 min read)

A FIELD STUDY ON COOPERATIVENESS AND

  • IMPATIENCE IN THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS Ernst Fehr and Andreas Leibbrandt1 May 5, 2011 Abstract: Economic theory – which assumes the existence of general across-situational traits – thus predicts that fishermen who exhibit more cooperative and less impatient behavior in the laboratory should be less likely to exploit the CPR, which their findings confirm.
  • The authors thus corroborate economic theory and extend the scope of other-regarding preference theories to crucial economic decisions with lasting consequences for the people involved.
  • If capital requirements are high, however, impatient individuals might shy away from investing in technology that facilitates the exploitation of natural resources and thus be less likely to exploit natural resources.
  • To provide a rigorous test of whether cooperativeness and impatience are relevant in the field, the authors use laboratory preference measures that differ from the field context in important ways.

A. Field Setting

  • Several rural fishing villages10 are situated around this lake; fishing is the main and often the only possible way of earning a living.
  • There is free access to the fishing grounds (shrimp and fishing grounds), and a fisherman’s capital requirements are rather low.
  • Other fishermen usually respect these spots, i.e. most fishermen do not fish at or close to another fisherman's spot.
  • The fishermen are aware of the fact that overfishing – for instance by using shrimp traps with small holes – has negative externalities on others12 10 We use the term "villages" for reasons of simplicity.the authors.the authors.
  • Governmental and local university institutions have taken note of the severity of the situation and have initiated first steps to help sustain the fishing grounds.

B. Field Data

  • In the following sections, the authors report the 2008 data from the fishermen catching shrimp (‘shrimpers’).
  • Participants received a code to ensure anonymity for the laboratory.
  • The smaller the holes in the traps, the greater the share of infertile shrimp caught in the trap (i.e. those with a length smaller than three centimeters).
  • Thus, it seems unlikely that a substantial fraction of fishermen gave us unusual bottles with larger holes or increased the size of the holes.
  • In the survey, the authors asked fishermen to estimate how many liters of shrimp they catch in general during a good week and find that the larger the hole size, the fewer liters of shrimp the fishermen report catching (r =- 0.246, p=0.0077).

C. The Relation between Other-Regarding Preferences and Impatience in the Laboratory

  • Other-regarding preferences and impatience might play an important role in explaining the individual degree of CPR exploitation in the field.
  • The laboratory provides an opportunity for deriving distinct measures for both factors.
  • Because there are no intertemporal spillovers in the PGE, measured impatience in the TPE should not predict cooperativeness in the laboratory.
  • This is also true after controlling for covariates.
  • In 24 Unfortunately, the authors could not play the TPE in two of their experimental sessions because the pralines were sold out in the local store.

III. Predicting Cooperation in the Field with Laboratory Preference Measures

  • The heart of this paper uses their laboratory preference measures to predict individual levels of CPR exploitation.
  • The authors use the public goods and time preference experiment to predict the average hole size in the fishermen's shrimp traps.
  • The authors hypothesize (i) that fishermen who contribute more in the PGE use shrimp traps with bigger holes so that small, infertile, shrimp can escape more easily, and (ii) that fishermen who are impatient in the TPE use shrimp traps with smaller holes that are more exploitative of the fishing grounds.

A. Other-regarding Preferences and Hole Size in Shrimp Traps

  • Figure 2 provides a first insight into the relationship between contributions in the PGE and the average hole size in the shrimp traps.
  • Fishermen with the highest contributions who contribute at least half of their endowment have substantially larger hole sizes than the other fishermen (0.482 centimeters, N=45).
  • Moreover, there is no significant relationship between this time preference measure and children or altruism in a charity experiment (p>0.28 in both cases).
  • The additional control for cognitive skills also leaves the effect of individual contribution levels and impatience on hole size largely unchanged (coefficient for cooperativeness=0.0097, p=0.028; coefficient for impatience=-0.0615, p=0.023 in model 4, for example).
  • The number of shrimp traps in use that fishermen report is significantly predictive of hole size in model 3 and marginally predictive in model 4, showing that fishermen who use larger holes also tend to use fewer shrimp traps.

IV. Further corroborating evidence

  • The authors provide further evidence on the role of other-regarding and time preferences for CPR conservation by examining the behavior of fishermen most of whom use fishnets to catch fish.
  • Note also that fishermen vary the quantity of shrimp traps they use.
  • Thus, the same arguments that speak for hole size as a measure of cooperativeness in the field also apply for mesh size.
  • Nine fishermen reported frequently using two different mesh sizes.

A. The 2006 Field Data

  • The authors collected data on the mesh sizes of the fishnets from two sources: survey responses in 2006 and field observations in 2008.
  • The fishermen also took part in a laboratory public goods and time preference experiment played anonymously (PGE 06 and TPE 06).
  • Contributions declined continuously in the remaining four periods.
  • In the TPE 06, fishermen had to indicate whether they preferred one bottle of mineral water immediately or two bottles the next day.

B. Cooperativeness, Impatience, and Fishnet Mesh Size

  • The authors find a highly significant positive relationship between behavior in the PGE 06 and mesh size.
  • After the experiments, the authors asked the village leader whether all participants collected their goods – which was the case.
  • In model (2), the authors only use the small sub-sample of 35 fishermen where they observed the fishnets and they control for the significant covariates from model (1).
  • It turns out that if 35 While it is difficult to find an exact correlation between a one centimeter difference in mesh size with respect to the size of fish ultimately caught (since this depends on the type of fish), the fishermen estimate this to be approximately 3–7 centimeters.

V. Conclusion

  • The authors show that cooperativeness plays an important role in economic decisions with lasting consequences in naturally occurring situations.
  • The fact that the authors nevertheless find a robust and significant link between their laboratory preference measures and their field measures challenges the view that an economic approach that is based on relatively stable preferences is useless; while preferences may be affected by contextual factors they are not so highly context-dependent as to render generalizability and predictability across contexts impossible.
  • Likewise, knowledge about the conditional nature of fishermen’s cooperativeness may be useful, i.e., their conditional willingness to cooperate in concrete situations, even if cooperation goes against their immediate self-interest.
  • Individuals could be approached to commit in advance to change their behavior towards a more sustainable use of resources, but this commitment would only become binding if a specified majority of the other resource users also were to commit.
  • Thus, impatient individuals who lack self-control and conditionally cooperative individuals would be more likely to commit to this policy than to an alternative policy requiring unconditional cooperation and imposing the cost of cooperation in the current period.

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Citations
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TL;DR: In a survey of fifty experiments, this paper found that incentives and social preferences may be either substitutes (crowding out) or complements (Crowding in), and that the evaluation of public policy must be restricted to allocations that are supportable as Nash equilibria when account is taken of these crowding effects.
Abstract: Explicit economic incentives designed to increase contributions to public goods and to promote other pro-social behavior sometimes are counterproductive or less effective than would be predicted among entirely self-interested individuals. This may occur when incentives adversely affect individuals’ altruism, ethical norms, intrinsic motives to serve the public, and other social preferences. The opposite also occurs—crowding in —though it appears less commonly . In the fifty experiments that we survey, these effects are common, so that incentives and social preferences may be either substitutes (crowding out) or complements (crowding in). We provide evidence for four mechanisms that may account for these incentive effects on preferences: namely that incentives may (i) provide information about the person who implemented the incentive, (ii) frame the decision situation so as to suggest appropriate behavior, (iii) compromise a control averse individual’s sense of autonomy, and (iv) affect the process by which people learn new preferences. An implication is that the evaluation of public policy must be restricted to allocations that are supportable as Nash equilibria when account is taken of these crowding effects. We show that well designed fines, subsidies, and the like minimize crowding out and may even do the opposite, making incentives and social preferences complements rather than substitutes. ( JEL D02, D03, D04, D83, E61, H41, Z13)

618 citations

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TL;DR: In this article, the authors link administrative data to survey responses and behavior in incentivized experiments to understand why investors hold socially responsible mutual funds, and find that both social preferences and social signaling explain socially responsible investment (SRI) decisions.
Abstract: To understand why investors hold socially responsible mutual funds, we link administrative data to survey responses and behavior in incentivized experiments. We find that both social preferences and social signaling explain socially responsible investment (SRI) decisions. Financial motives play less of a role. Socially responsible investors in our sample expect to earn lower returns on SRI funds than on conventional funds and pay higher management fees. This suggests that investors are willing to forgo financial performance in order to invest in accordance with their social preferences.

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TL;DR: A theoretical framework is presented that identifies 4 broad situational affordances across interdependent situations that can determine when, which, and how personality traits should be expressed in prosocial behavior and found that narrow and broad traits alike can account for Prosocial behavior, informing the bandwidth-fidelity problem.
Abstract: Decades of research document individual differences in prosocial behavior using controlled experiments that model social interactions in situations of interdependence. However, theoretical and empirical integration of the vast literature on the predictive validity of personality traits to account for these individual differences is missing. Here, we present a theoretical framework that identifies 4 broad situational affordances across interdependent situations (i.e., exploitation, reciprocity, temporal conflict, and dependence under uncertainty) and more specific subaffordances within certain types of interdependent situations (e.g., possibility to increase equality in outcomes) that can determine when, which, and how personality traits should be expressed in prosocial behavior. To test this framework, we meta-analyzed 770 studies reporting on 3,523 effects of 8 broad and 43 narrow personality traits on prosocial behavior in interdependent situations modeled in 6 commonly studied economic games (Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, Prisoner's Dilemma, Public Goods Game, and Commons Dilemma). Overall, meta-analytic correlations ranged between -.18 ≤ ρ ≤ .26, and most traits yielding a significant relation to prosocial behavior had conceptual links to the affordances provided in interdependent situations, most prominently the possibility for exploitation. Moreover, for several traits, correlations within games followed the predicted pattern derived from a theoretical analysis of affordances. On the level of traits, we found that narrow and broad traits alike can account for prosocial behavior, informing the bandwidth-fidelity problem. In sum, the meta-analysis provides a theoretical foundation that can guide future research on prosocial behavior and advance our understanding of individual differences in human prosociality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

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22 Feb 2013-Science
TL;DR: China's One-Child Policy (OCP), one of the most radical approaches to limiting population growth, has produced significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals.
Abstract: We document that China's One-Child Policy (OCP), one of the most radical approaches to limiting population growth, has produced significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals. Our data were collected from economics experiments conducted with 421 individuals born just before and just after the OCP's introduction in 1979. Surveys to elicit personality traits were also used. We used the exogenous imposition of the OCP to identify the causal impact of being an only child, net of family background effects. The OCP thus has significant ramifications for Chinese society.

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TL;DR: In the second part of the paper concrete forms and examples of the effects of incentives on the social preferences are shown and experiments are described where these effects occur as discussed by the authors, and the authors claim that the negative consequences of the incentives are connected less to the incentives themselves as, rather, with their perceptions among the agents.
Abstract: In the second part of the paper concrete forms and examples of the effects of incentives on the social preferences are shown and experiments are described where these effects occur. The authors claim that the negative consequences of the incentives are connected less to the incentives themselves as, rather, with their perceptions among the agents. That is why for a reasonable use of incentives one has to take account of possible effects of such perceptions.

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References
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TL;DR: This paper showed that if some people care about equity, the puzzles can be resolved and that the economic environment determines whether the fair types or the selesh types dominate equilibrium behavior in cooperative games.
Abstract: There is strong evidence that people exploit their bargaining power in competitivemarkets butnot inbilateral bargainingsituations. Thereisalsostrong evidence that people exploit free-riding opportunities in voluntary cooperation games. Yet, when they are given the opportunity to punish free riders, stable cooperation is maintained, although punishment is costly for those who punish. This paper asks whether there is a simple common principle that can explain this puzzling evidence. We show that if some people care about equity the puzzles can be resolved. It turns out that the economic environment determines whether the fair types or the selesh types dominate equilibrium behavior.

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Abstract: The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. The pollution problem is a consequence of population. Analysis of the pollution problem as a function of population density uncovers a not generally recognized principle of morality, namely: the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. Perhaps the simplest summary of the analysis of man’s population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another. The man who takes money from a bank acts as if the bank were a commons.

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Abstract: When people make donations to privately provided public goods, such as charity, there may be many factors influencing their decision other than altruism. Social pressure, guilt, sympathy, or simply a desire for a "warm glow" may all be important. This paper considers such impure altruism formally and develops a wide set of implications. In particular, this paper discusses the invariance proposition of public goods, solves for the sufficient conditions for neutrality to hold, examines the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving, and calibrates the model based on econometric studies in order to consider policy experiments. Impure altruism is shown to be more consistent with observed patterns of giving than the conventional pure altruism approach, and to have policy implications that may differ widely from those of the conventional models. Copyright 1990 by Royal Economic Society.

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"A field study on cooperativeness an..." refers background in this paper

  • ...…and 2002; Casari and Plott, 2003; Croson, 2007; Charness and Villeval, 2009), suggesting that some individuals have other-regarding preferences (Andreoni, 1990; Rabin, 1993; Fehr and Schmidt, 1999; Bolton and Ockenfels, 2000; Charness and Rabin, 2002; Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger, 2004; Sobel,…...

    [...]

Frequently Asked Questions (10)
Q1. What have the authors contributed in "A field study on cooperativeness and impatience in the tragedy of the commons" ?

This paper examines the role of cooperativeness and impatience in the exploitation of common pool resources ( CPRs ) by combining laboratory experiments with field data. The authors study fishermen whose main, and often only, source of income stems from the use of fishing grounds with open access. A field study on cooperativeness and impatience in the Tragedy of the Commons. 2011. 05. 013 A FIELD STUDY ON COOPERATIVENESS AND IMPATIENCE IN THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS Ernst Fehr and Andreas Leibbrandt 

For example, the fishermen could commit ( e. g., by signing a contract with an environmental agency ) to exchange their fishnets with small mesh size for fishnets with bigger mesh size in the future if a specified majority of the other fishermen were also willing to commit to this policy. This proposal takes advantage of the conditional nature of fishermen ’ s willingness to cooperate and furthermore reduces the perception of the cost of cooperation by shifting the fishnet exchange into the future. 

2461.45% are patient and prefer waiting approximately two hours until the end of the experimental session to get three pralines, while the remaining 38.55% are impatient and prefer receiving two pralines immediately. 

Participating fishermen also had the possibility of seeing the experimenters give the village leaders the mineral water for distribution on the next day. 

Economic theories of other-regarding preferences predict that individuals who exhibita higher propensity to cooperate in the public goods experiment in the laboratory (i.e. those who demonstrate cooperativeness) and those who show more patience in the time preference experiment should use fishing instruments that are less likely to exploit the CPR for the following reasons: (i) a higher current exploitation reduces other fishermen's current yield. 

Because there are no intertemporal spillovers in the PGE, measured impatience in the TPE should not predict cooperativeness in the laboratory. 

The additional control for cognitive skills also leaves the effect of individual contribution levels and impatience on hole size largely unchanged (coefficient for cooperativeness=0.0097, p=0.028; coefficient for impatience=-0.0615, p=0.023 in model 4, for example). 

Years in profession is negatively related to hole size, suggesting that policies aiming at mitigating CPR exploitation should be targeted towards more experienced fishermen in particular. 

Participants received a code to ensure anonymity for the laboratoryThe authors selected community agglomerations that can be considered astraditional fishing villages and which were accessible by car. 

As the shrimpers do not record their catch quantity or their catch composition over time, it is impossible to collect objective data on these variables over longer time periods (i.e. several months).