article Open access
Common Pool Resource Appropriation under Costly Cooperation
Nancy McCarthya b✉, Élisabeth Sadouletc d, Alain de Janvryc d
- aInternational Food Policy Research Institute, 2033 K Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20006
- bInternational Livestock Research Institute
- cGiannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics
- dUniversity of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California, 94720
- ✉Corresponding author
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Abstract
Abstract In addition to the usual fixed costs, we introduce variable costs in a community's effort to cooperate in extracting from a common pool resource. Using a standard supervision mechanism, these variable costs are shown to be an increasing function of individual members' incentives to default. The model explains why we frequently observe communities that all cooperate and have relatively similar resource endowments, and yet achieve very different levels of extraction.