Browsing by Author "Stranlund, John"

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Centralized and Decentralized Management of Local Common Pool Resources in the Developing World: Experimental Evidence from Fishing Communities in Colombia
(2006) Velez, Maria Alejandra; Murphy, James J.; Stranlund, John
"This paper uses experimental data to test for a complementary relationship between formal regulations imposed on a community to conserve a local natural resource and nonbinding verbal agreements to do the same. Our experiments were conducted in the field in three regions of Colombia. Each group of five subjects played 10 rounds of an open access common pool resource game, and 10 additional rounds under one of five institutions communication alone, two external regulations that differed by the level of enforcement, and communication combined with each of the two regulations. Our results suggest that the hypothesis of a complementary relationship between communication and external regulation is supported for some combinations of regions and regulations, but cannot be supported in general. We therefore conclude that the determination of whether formal regulations and informal communication are complementary must be made on a community-by-community basis."
Effectiveness of Communication and Regulation in Local Commons: Some Evidence from Experiments in the Field
(1998) Cárdenas, Juan-Camilo; Stranlund, John; Willis, Cleve
"Agents are apt to over-exploit common-pool resources. Two devices for nudging individuals toward efficient use of a local common are government imposition and enforcement of rules and simple communication. Experiments were conducted in areas of rural Colombia to study the effects of these two devices on the behavior of individuals who are actually involved in a local commons. Communication among subjects improved efficiency. A more dramatic increase in efficiency obtained when a government regulation was introduced, but that efficiency degraded to no-communication levels after only a few rounds of experience."
What Motivates Common Pool Resource Users: Experimental Evidence from the Field
(2005) Velez, Maria Alejandra; Stranlund, John; Murphy, James J.
"This paper develops and tests several models of pure Nash strategies of individuals who extract from a common pool resource when they are motivated by a combination of self-interest and other motivations such as altruism, reciprocity, inequity aversion and conformism. We test whether an econometric summary of subjects' strategies is consistent with one of these motivations using data from a series of common pool resource experiments conducted in three regions of Colombia. As expected, average extraction levels are less than that predicted by a model of pure self-interest, but are nevertheless sub-optimal. Moreover, we find that a model of conformism with monotonically increasing best response functions best describes average strategies. Our empirical results are inconsistent with models of altruism, reciprocity and inequity aversion."
Within and Between Group Variation of Individual Strategies in Common Pool Resources: Evidence from Field Experiments
(2006) Velez, Maria Alejandra; Murphy, James J.; Stranlund, John
"With data from framed common pool resource experiments conducted with artisanal fishing communities in Colombia, we estimate a hierarchical linear model to investigate within-group and between-group variation in individual harvest strategies across several institutions. Our results suggest that communication serves to effectively coordinate individual strategies within groups, but that these coordinated strategies vary considerably across groups. In contrast, weakly enforced regulatory restrictions on individual harvests (as well as unregulated open access) produce significant variation in the individual strategies within groups, but these strategies are roughly replicated across groups so that there is little between-group variation."