Digital Library of the Commons

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What Do People Bring Into the Game? Experiments in the Field about Cooperation in the Commons
(2004) Cárdenas, Juan-Camilo; Ostrom, Elinor
The study of collective action requires an understanding of the individual incentives and of the institutional constraints that guide people in making choices about cooperating or defecting on the group facing the dilemma. The use of local ecosystems by groups of individuals is just one example where individual extraction increases well-being, but aggregate extraction decreases it. The use of economic experiments has enhanced the already diverse knowledge from theoretical and field sources of when and how groups can solve the problem through self-governing mechanisms. These studies have identified several factors that promote and limit collective action, associated with the nature of the production system that allows groups to benefit from a joint-access local ecosystem, and associated with the institutional incentives and constraints from both self-governed and externally imposed rules. In general, there is widespread agreement that cooperation can happen and be chosen by individuals as a rational strategy, beyond the Â"tragedy of the commonsÂ" prediction. A first step in this paper is to propose a set of layers of information that the individuals might be using to decide over their level of cooperation. The layers range from the material incentives that the specific production function imposes, to the dynamics of the game, to the composition of the group and the individual characteristics of the player. We next expand the experimental literature by analyzing data from a set of experiments conducted in the field with actual ecosystem users in three rural villages of Colombia using this framework. We find that repetition brings reciprocity motives into the decision making. Further, prior experience of the participants, their perception of external regulation, or the composition of the group in terms of their wealth and social position in the village, influence decisions to cooperate or defect in the experiment. The results suggest that understanding the multiple levels of the game, in terms of the incentives, the group and individual characteristics or the context, can help understand and therefore explore the potentials for solving the collective-action dilemma.
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."
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."
Experimental Contributions to Collective Action Theory
(2009) Coleman, Eric A.; Ostrom, Elinor
"Collective action problems are difficult problems that pervade all forms of social organization, from within the family, to the organization of production activities within a firm, and to the provision of public goods (PG) and the management of common-pool resources (CPRs) at local, regional, national, and global scales. Collective action problems occur when a group of individuals could achieve a common benefit if most contribute needed resources. Those who would benefit the most, however, are individuals who do not contribute to the provision of the joint benefit and free ride on the efforts of others. If all free ride, however, no benefits are provided."
Building Trust to Solve Commons Dilemmas: Taking Small Steps to Test an Evolving Theory of Collective Action
(2008) Ostrom, Elinor
"Problems of the commons exist in a wide variety of settings ranging in size and complexity from the family (e.g., the household budget and the kitchen sink) to the global scale (e.g., loss of biodiversity and global warming). Game theory is a useful theoretical tool for representing a simplified, core social dilemma facing a set of individuals sharing a commons. Game theorists, who assume that individuals base decisions on immediate returns to self, frequently use the Prisoners' Dilemma game to represent the problem of the commons. The individuals in such a game are assumed to have complete information about the strategy space they face and the outcomes that will be obtained depending on their own and others' actions. On the other hand, the pure theory is about individuals who do not know one another, do not share a common history, and cannot communicate with one another. In this model, game theory predicts that individuals jointly using a commons will overharvest, leading to Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons.'"
The Meaning of Social Capital and its Link to Collective Action
(2007) Ostrom, Elinor; Ahn, Toh-Kyeong
From p. 2-3: "The social capital approach takes these factors seriously as causes of behavior and collective social outcomes. The social capital approach does this in ways that are consistent with continued and lively development of neoclassical economics and rational choice approaches. In sum, the social capital approach improves the knowledge of macro political and economic phenomena by expanding the factors to be incorporated in such knowledge and by constructing richer causality among those factors, and by achieving these without dismissing the insights from neoclassical economics and rational choice theories. "Abundant, and often valid, criticisms of the concept have also levied against it (Arrow 1999; Solow 1999; Fine 2001; Durlauf 2002 - to name a few). Solow notes that much of the social capital research is plagued by 'vague ideas' and 'casual empiricism.' Academic research can be afflicted by fads and fashions just as much as any other field. We believe, however, that the concept of social capital can be defined carefully. It is a useful concept that should take its place alongside physical and human capital as core concepts of great usefulness to the social sciences."
A Course of Study in Institutional Analysis and Development
(1991-1992) Ostrom, Vincent; Ostrom, Elinor; Herzberg, Roberta
"This seminar is an effort to build a multidisciplinary approach to institutional analysis an development that draws heavily upon work in anthropology, economics, law, political science, public administration, and sociology. The effort is to developa coherent theoretical approach that is consistent with work in public choice theory and the new institutional economics but focusing upon institutional analysis more generally. We proceed upon a presupposition that alternative institutional arrangements are available for those types of problems that are common to all human societies. Choice is possible; and choice of institutional arrangements is grounded in informed calculations that take account of both positive and normative considerations. The focus in institutional analysis is upon rule-ordered relationships and the way that these affect structures of incentives that facilitate or impede developmental opportunities. This seminar constitutes the theoretical core for the more general intellectual excange amoung scholars participating in the Workshop's program for advanced study in comparrative institutional analysis and development. The approach is intended to offer a mode of inquiry concerned with the nature and constitution of order in human societies."
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."
The Implications of the Logic of Collective Inaction for Administrative Theory
(1987) Ostrom, Elinor
"The publication in 1965 of Mancur Olson's book The Logic of Collective Action fundamentally changed the view of many scholars and public officials about the likelihood that individuals will solve collective action problems without the intervention of central administrative authorities. Olson built his analysis on two broad presumptions that are fundamentally sound. The first presumption is that attributes of the set of individuals facing a common problem affect their capabilities to solve problems themselves. Olson identified the size of the group as the most important group attribute affecting collective action. The second presumption was that attributes of the phenomena involved in a problem -- exclusion and jointness -- would also affect the capabilities of a set of individuals to solve a common problem. In regard to both of these foundational building blocks, Olson made particular choices in the way he defined and used concepts which have generated considerable confusion. Since the concepts of group size and the nature of goods are important elements of future work, it is important to examine how Olson used these terms, what problems he ran into, and how we can reformulate these concepts for future theoretical and empirical work. "This paper contains an analysis of the concepts of size of group and public goods as contained in Olson's theory. Where Olson used one term to refer to several concepts, separate terms will be defined for each of the concepts he uses. Where Olson incorrectly argued that he had established a general, rather than a limited, proposition, the conditions affecting whether a particular proposition stands or not will be discussed. The implications of this reformulated foundation for the practice and theory of administration is discussed in the last section."
The Elements of an Action Situation
(1983) Ostrom, Elinor
From page 1: "In my paper entitled 'A Method of Institutional Analysis,' which will appear as Chapter 23 in the book entitled Guidance, Control, and Performance Evaluation in the Public Sector, edited by Kaufmann, Majone, and V. Ostrom (forthcoming, 1984), I identified a conceptual unit ? called an 'action arena' that could be utilized to analyze, predict, and explain behavior within a wide array of different institutional arrangements. An action arena contains both a model of an action situation and a model of the actors in that situation. A model of the action situation can be characterized using seven clusters of variables ? participants, positions, outcomes, action-outcome linkages, information, the level of control that participants exercise at choice nodes, and the costs and benefits assigned to outcomes and actions. A model of the 'actor' includes assumptions about four clusters of variables: the resources that an actor brings to a situation; the valuation actors assign to states of the world and to actions; the way actors acquire, process, retain, and use information; and the processes actors use for selection of particular courses of action. Using the set of assumptions made about the situation and the actor, the analyst predicts the types of actions that will be selected by participants and how these are likely to cumulate into results."

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