Browsing by Author "Janssen, Marco"

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The Effect of Constrained Communication and Limited Information in Governing a Common Resource
(2014) Janssen, Marco; Tyson, Madeline; Lee, Allen
"Allowing resource users to communicate in behavioural 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 significant effect than limiting information on the performance of groups."
Institutions and the Performance of Coupled Infrastructure Systems: Insights from Large-N Studies of Ostrom's Institutional Design Principles
(2015) Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco
"Some of the most challenging problems that modern societies face involve social dilemmas related to natural resources and the environment. Readers of this journal will be intimately familiar with the notion of social dilemmas, indirectly referenced in the journal title through the word 'commons'. Many scholars have worked for decades to understand what characteristics of social organization enable groups to solve social dilemmas. Social dilemmas involve two problems 1) individuals face a choice in which the best outcome can only be achieved if many other decision makers make a choice that benefits the total payoff of the group and 2) there is no way to guarantee others will also make decisions that will benefit the group, so individuals face strong incentives to make a choice that is best for themselves and will have negative impacts on the group. Solving these two problems has proven to be devilishly difficult as Hardin (1968) reminded the (academic) world almost 50 years ago. Again, as readers of this journal know, the dominant discourse around social dilemmas at the time of Hardin’s article and the subsequent 20 years suggested that their solution required the intervention of an exogenous governance body that either a) directly restricts choices of actors thus removing challenge 2 of social dilemmas or b) establishes and enforces property rights removing challenge 1. Of course, these two solutions are just different sides of the same theoretical coin, differentiated by an arbitrary choice about the assignment of 'property rights'."
Learning from regulatory failure: How Ostrom’s restorative justice design principle helps naïve groups create wiser enforcement systems to overcome the tragedy of the commons
(2024) DeCaro, Daniel; DeCaro, Marci; Janssen, Marco; Lee, Allen; Graci, Alanea; Flener, Devin
Rule enforcement is critical in democratic, self-governing societies. Many political disputes occur when citizens do not understand the fundamental rationales for enforcement (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic). We examined how naïve groups learn and develop wise enforcement systems. Based on theories from behavioral economics, political science, psychology, and education, we predicted that groups need to experience failure of an enforcement system, but be guided on restorative justice principles to collectively learn from this failure. Undergraduate students (N=288) from a Midwestern U.S. metropolitan university self-governed a simulated common-pool resource with real financial payoffs. Groups began with one of three conditions designed to create different experiences with enforcement and regulatory failure: (a) no enforcement (no communication or peer sanctioning), (b) lax enforcement (communication with peer-sanctioning), or (c) regulatory abuse (peer sanctioning without communication). Half then received facilitated guidance on restorative justice principles (e.g., discuss whether/why to use sanctions). To examine cooperation, we measured how well participants maintained the resource. To examine group learning, we created a novel coding system, which tracked groups’ constitutional decisions about conservation agreements and enforcement, conceptual understanding, and the enforcement systems they created. No enforcement and lax enforcement conditions quickly yielded moderate cooperation via voluntary agreements. However, such agreements prevented groups from discovering how and why to use enforcement (peer sanctioning) to improve performance. Initial exposure to regulatory failure had different effects depending on facilitation. Unfacilitated groups fixated on initial misconceptions, causing them to abandon or create less sophisticated enforcement systems, hindering cooperation. Facilitated groups learned from prior failure—discovering principles of wise enforcement (e.g., collective efficiency, self-restraint)—and created more sophisticated enforcement systems (e.g., coordinated sanctions) that improved cooperation. Guidance on restorative justice principles and experience with regulatory abuse may be necessary preconditions for naïve individuals to understand and develop wiser collective enforcement systems.