Sanctioning by Participants in Collective Action Problems

Abstract

"This paper will focus on explaining monitoring and sanctioning, since these activities are crucial to an explanation of the findings in all four categories discussed above. In Section II we summarize two examples of field settings that fall into the second category to provide a more detailed view of what this behavior looks like in natural settings. In Sections III and IV we move from field settings into an experimental laboratory setting where a substantial level of control over relevant parameters is achieved. Section III provides a baseline situation of limited access CPRs where appropriators cannot monitor or sanction. In Section IV, we analyze experiments where appropriators monitor each others' behavior and sanction one another if they are willing to expend resources to do so. We find that subgame perfect equilibrium theory does not explain observed sanctioning behavior the field or experimental settings of limited access CPRs."