Rules and Games: Institutions and Common Pool Resources (DRAFT)

Abstract

"The central thesis of this book is that individuals jointly using a CPR face incentives leading to harm for themselves and others. The degree of harm depends on the rules they use and the environment in which they make decisions. We formalize this relationship using the framework of institutional analysis and noncooperative game theory. The relationship between rules and games is of fundamental importance to all of the social sciences and particularly when social science is used in policy-making. We intend to explore the general relationship between rules and games and do so by focusing on a broad family of games of considerable substantive importance—the games that appropriators play when they decide upon investment and harvesting activities related to CPRs. We begin with a formal definition for a CPR and a CPR dilemma."