Digital Library of the Commons

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Property Rights Conundrum: Does Common + Property = Nothing in Common and No Property Rights?
(1987) Schlager, Edella; Ostrom, Elinor
"The thesis we develop in this paper is that our theoretical and empirical knowledge of how various types of property rights regimes affect incentives, behavior, and outcomes cannot cumulate as long as we use an ambiguous term--common property resource--to refer to different theoretical and operational situations. We briefly review how resource economists have used the term 'common property resources' to analyze the problem of fisheries. We then analyze the different bundles of rights which are included in various conceptions of property and define four types of legal positions--owners, proprietors, claimants, and squatters--by reference to which bundle of rights is possessed or not. Next we examine whether the set of right holders is defined or not and the individual or group status of the right holders. For rights held by collectivities, we examine whether the groups are organized or not and the type of enterprise structure involved. We then present a classification of property rights and organizational arrangements which enables us to sharpen predictions about particular property rights regimes which are likely to face problems of over-exploitation, extinction of species,and over investment of resources. Finally, we will illustrate how such a conceptual scheme helps bring clarity to disparate research findings related to the lobster industry in Maine."
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.
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."
Common Property, Communal Property, and Natural Resources: Some Conceptual Clarifications (DRAFT)
(1987) Schlager, Edella; Ostrom, Elinor
"Conceptualizing and defining property rights is a crucial step in examining natural resources and challenges to their viability. How we understand property rights not only shapes our perception of resource degradation problems but also our prescriptions for the resolution of these problems. When the terms that we use as scientists are ambiguous and refer to substantially different real world situations, we reduce our analytical and prescriptive clarity. The term 'common property resource' is a term that is used to refer to many different property-rights regimes including: (1) The absence of any property rights, (2) The absence of a sole owner, (3) The absence of private property, (4) Ownership of a resource by a small community which regulates use patterns for residents, and (5) ownership of a resource by a large government which allows all residents of that government access to a resource under varying degrees of regulation."
Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis
(1991) Schlager, Edella; Ostrom, Elinor
"The term 'common-property resource' is an example of a term repeatedly used to refer to property owned by a government or by no one. It is also used for property owned by a community of resource users. Such usage leads to confusion in scientific study and policy analysis. In this paper we develop a conceptual schema for arraying property-rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights ranging from authorized user, to claimant, to proprietor, and to owner. We apply this conceptual schema to analyze findings from a variety of empirical settings including the Maine lobster industry."
Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic System
(2009) Ostrom, Elinor
"In this article, I will describe the intellectual journey that I have taken the last half century from when I began graduate studies in the late 1950s. The early efforts to understand the polycentric water industry in California were formative for me. In addition to working with Vincent Ostrom and Charles Tiebout as they formulated the concept of polycentric systems for governing metropolitan areas, I studied the efforts of a large group of private and public water producers facing the problem of an overdrafted groundwater basin on the coast and watching saltwater intrusion threaten the possibility of long-term use. Then, in the 1970s, I participated with colleagues in the study of polycentric police industries serving US metropolitan areas to find that the dominant theory underlying massive reform proposals was incorrect. Metropolitan areas served by a combination of large and small producers could achieve economies of scale in the production of some police services and avoid diseconomies of scale in the production of others."
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."
The Governance and Management of Irrigation Systems: An Institutional Perspective
(1993) Yan-Tang, Shui; Ostrom, Elinor
"During the past three decades, massive resources have been invested by donor agencies and developing countries in technologically sophisticated, large-scale irrigation projects. Even though the planning processes for these projects rely on modern benefit-cost analysis, many projects that looked outstanding on paper have not fared well 'on the ground.' Costs have usually been higher than expected, and benefits have been lower. Cost recovery has often not proved feasible."
TURFs in the Lab: Institutional Innovation in Real-Time Dynamic Spatial Commons
(2007) Janssen, Marco A.; Ostrom, Elinor
"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."
Common Property Regimes in the Forest: Just a Relic from the Past?
(1995) McKean, Margaret A.; Ostrom, Elinor
"Common property regimes, used by communities to manage forests and other resources for long-term benefits, were once widespread around the globe. Some may have disappeared naturally as communities opted for other arrangements, particularly in the face of technological and economic change, but in most instances common property regimes seem to have been legislated out of existence. This happened in two basic ways: where common property regimes - however elaborate and long-lasting - had never been codified, they may simply have been left out of a country's first attempt to formalize and codify property rights to the resources in question (for example, in Indonesia, Brazil and most countries of sub-Saharan Africa). Where common property regimes had legal recognition, land reforms sometimes transferred all such rights to individuals (as in the case of enclosure in the United Kingdom) or to the government itself, or to a combination of the two (as in India and Japan)."

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