TURFs in the Lab: Institutional Innovation in Real-Time Dynamic Spatial Commons

Abstract

"Using a real-time, spatial, renewable resource environment, we observe participants in a set of experiments formulating informal rules during communication sessions between three decision rounds. In all three rounds, the resource is open access. Without communication, the resource is persistently and rapidly depleted. With face-to-face communication, we observe informal arrangements to divide up space and slow down the harvesting rate in various ways. We observe that experienced participants, who have participated in a similar private property type of experiments, are more effective in creating rules, although they mimic the private property regime of their prior experience. Inexperienced participants need an extra round to reach the same level of resource use, but they craft a diverse set of novel rule sets."