Does the allocation of property rights matter in the commons
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Accepted Manuscript (AM)
Author(s)
Leibbrandt, Andreas
Lynham, John
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2018
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A popular solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is to create private property rights to access the commons. If resource users care about the welfare of others, they may be unwilling to respect property rights regimes that lead to unfair or inequitable outcomes. We explore in a series of laboratory experiments whether it is possible to undermine the efficacy of property rights solutions through the allocation process. We find that both the extent to which property rights are enforced and how they are allocated significantly affect extraction and compliance. Our findings suggest that one of the most popular allocation methods ...
View more >A popular solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is to create private property rights to access the commons. If resource users care about the welfare of others, they may be unwilling to respect property rights regimes that lead to unfair or inequitable outcomes. We explore in a series of laboratory experiments whether it is possible to undermine the efficacy of property rights solutions through the allocation process. We find that both the extent to which property rights are enforced and how they are allocated significantly affect extraction and compliance. Our findings suggest that one of the most popular allocation methods is suboptimal: we observe that occasional enforcement and the proportional allocation of property rights is dominated by no enforcement and the equal or inverse allocation of property rights. Our results support the view that allocation matters for property rights solutions to the commons problem.
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View more >A popular solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is to create private property rights to access the commons. If resource users care about the welfare of others, they may be unwilling to respect property rights regimes that lead to unfair or inequitable outcomes. We explore in a series of laboratory experiments whether it is possible to undermine the efficacy of property rights solutions through the allocation process. We find that both the extent to which property rights are enforced and how they are allocated significantly affect extraction and compliance. Our findings suggest that one of the most popular allocation methods is suboptimal: we observe that occasional enforcement and the proportional allocation of property rights is dominated by no enforcement and the equal or inverse allocation of property rights. Our results support the view that allocation matters for property rights solutions to the commons problem.
View less >
Journal Title
JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT
Volume
89
Copyright Statement
© 2018 Taylor & Francis (Routledge). This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy on 24 April 2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2018.04.003
Subject
Economic theory
Applied economics