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Working Paper The Power and Limitations of Proportional Cutbacks in Common-Pool Resources(1998) Gardner, Roy; Herr, Andrew; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James M."This paper examines the success and limitations of proportional cutbacks as an allocation rule for improving the performance of common pool resources (CPRs). Two field cases, one success and one failure, motivate the analysis. For symmetric CPRs, we establish the existence of efficiency-enhancing proportional cutbacks. We then introduce complications that arise in the presence of asymmetries, where there are high value types and low value types. This asymmetry induces a continuum of proportional cutbacks that raise efficiency above Nash equilibrium. Calibrating a linear-quadratic CPR model to global carbon dioxide emissions, the efficiency and distributional consequences of proportional cutbacks like those embodied in the Kyoto Protocol are derived."Working Paper Rent Dissipation in Common Pool Resource Environments: Experimental Evidence(1989) Walker, James M.; Ostrom, Elinor; Gardner, Roy"This paper examines the resource environment classified as common-pool resource. The intent is to highlight and more carefully classify the specific forms of behavioral problems encountered in this resource allocation environment, with an emphasis on the particular allocation problem known commonly as 'rent dissipation.' We present evidence from laboratory experiments designed to investigate the robustness of theoretical models of rent dissipation in such environments. Following the theoretical work of such authors as Scott Gordon (1954), we investigate the strength of theoretical models which predict that users of common-pool resources will appropriate units from the resource at a rate which exceeds the point at which marginal returns equal marginal extraction costs. The logic of such models argues that appropriators will ignore the production externalites of their own appropriation and focus only on average returns from the resource. Following this argument, appropriation will take place at a level in which all rents are dissipated. Our experimental results present evidence from a behavioral investment environment designed to capture the key theoretical assumptions of the rent dissipation models. We offer evidence related to the extent of rent dissipation as related to subject experience in the environment, the form of the production technology of the common pool resource, and the size of the appropriation group."Working Paper Rules and Games: Institutions and Common Pool Resources (DRAFT)(1991) Ostrom, Elinor; Gardner, Roy; Walker, James M."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."Working Paper Trust in Private and Common Property Experiments(2007) Cox, James C.; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James M."We report the results from a series of experiments designed to investigate behavior in two settings that are frequently posited in the policy literature as generating different outcomes: private property and common property. The experimental settings closely parallel earlier experimental studies of the investment or trust game. The primary research question relates to the effect of the initial allocation of property rights on the level of trust that subjects will extend to others with whom they are linked. We find that initial endowments as common property lead to marginally greater cooperation or trust than when the initial endowment is fully owned by the first player as private property. Subjects' decisions are also shown to be correlated with attitudes toward trust and fairness measured in post-experiment questionnaires."Working Paper Heterogeneous Preferences and Collective Action(2003) Ahn, Toh-Kyeong; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James M."In recent years, scholars have turned to alternative representations of utility to capture motivational heterogeneity across individuals. In the research reported here, we examine two models of heterogeneous utility—linear-altruism and inequity-aversion—in the context of two-person, social dilemma games. Empirical tests are conducted drawing on data from experiments and surveys. We find that the model of inequity-aversion accounts for a substantial proportion of the preference types and behavior that are not explained by the standard model of self-interested preferences. In contrast, the altruism model does not provide a significant increase in explanatory power over the inequity aversion model."Working Paper Sanctioning by Participants in Collective Action Problems(1990) Walker, James M.; Gardner, Roy; Ostrom, Elinor"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."Working Paper Generating Distrust in PD Games: Fear, Greed, and History of Play(1999) Ahn, Toh-Kyeong; Ostrom, Elinor; Schmidt, David; Shupp, Robert; Walker, James M."The impact of game parameters, social history, and endogenous group formation on the choice of strategies in repeated PD games is experimentally examined. Overall, rates of cooperation are quite low and decline with repetition of the game. On the other hand, rates of cooperation are increased by increases in the level of cooperators gain, as well as in groups that endogenously, via strategy selection, 'self-select' into subgroups of relatively high cooperators. Rates of cooperation are also increased in situations where subjects are repeatedly matched with the same person, relative to situations with random matching between decision rounds."