Community management of forests by Van Panchayats (forest councils) to meet local needs has a long history in the Indian Central Himalayas. This essay examines the effects of village-level heterogeneity in caste and land ownership, and of female membership in the Panchayats on collective action...

A model of collective action in the commons that is intended to provide a framework for empirical research into the question of when cooperation is likely to be successful is presented. It is based on the presence of costly punishment opportunities, some players who have a taste for punishing...

This paper surveys the evolutionary game theoretic literature on reciprocity in human interactions, dealing both with long-term relationships and with sporadic interactions. Four basic themes, repetition, commitment, assortation, and parochialism, appear repeatedly throughout the literature....

A randomly selected treatment group of households in Gurgaon, India was informed whether (or not) their drinking water had tested positive for fecal contamination using a simple test costing about $0.50. Households that were not initially purifying their water, and were told that their drinking...

Strong reciprocity refers to the willingness to sacrifice one's own material self-interest to punish others for opportunistic actions. This propensity provides a decentralized mechanism for the enforcement of social norms, but its extent and persistence poses a theoretical puzzle. Since...

The demand for environmental quality is often presumed to be low in developingcountries due to poverty. Less attention has been paid to the possibility that lack of awareness about the adverse health effects of environmental pollution could also keep the demand low. We use a household survey...

A positive theory of mitigation of environmental degradation is discussed in order to understand the formation of environmental policy. When an environmental problem is not mitigated, this is because those affected don't know it is happening, cannot locate the cause, don't have the resources to...