Social dilemmas characterize decision environments in which individuals' exclusive pursuit of their own material self-interest can produce inefficient allocations. Two such environments are those characterized by public goods and common-pool resources in which the social dilemmas can be...

Abundant evidence suggests that high levels of contributions to public goods can be sustained through self-governed monitoring and sanctions. This experimental study investigates the effectiveness of decentralized sanctioning institutions where punishment opportunities are restricted to agents...

We examine behavior in one-shot appropriation games with deterministic and probabilistic degradation externalities, where the marginal net benefit from appropriation is endogenous, dependent on individuals' expectations of group appropriation. The experimental design involves a menu of games...

Abundant evidence suggests that high levels of contributions to public goods can be sustained through self-governed monitoring and sanctions. This experimental study investigates the effectiveness of decentralized sanctioning institutions where punishment opportunities are restricted to agents...

This study examines appropriation decisions in a linear appropriation game setting with variations in the resource damage from appropriation and simultaneous variations in the resource damage and the opportunity cost of conservation, where the ratio of these two variables is held constant. In...

This study examines individual and group behavior in a linear appropriation game setting. Subjects make decisions from a menu of eight games, without feedback. Four treatment conditions vary the magnitude of the opportunity cost of conservation, including symmetric and asymmetric treatments. A...

We report the results from a series of experiments designed to investigate behavior in two settings that are frequently posited in the policy literature as generating different outcomes: private property and common property. The experimental settings closely parallel earlier experimental studies...