Comparing Regulations to Protect the Commons: An Experimental Investigation

Abstract

We test in a laboratory experiment three regulations imposed on a common-pool resource game: an access fee and subsidy scheme, transferable quotas and non-transferable quotas. Theory predicts that they all reduce resource use from free access to the same target level without hurting users. We find that all regulations perform equally in reducing resources, although with more variance under the fee scheme. All fail to make all the users better off. The fee scheme performs better than transferable quotas in sorting out the most efficient users but at the cost of hurting them more often.

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Replaced by

Stefan Ambec, Alexis Garapin, Laurent Muller, Arnaud Reynaud, and Carine Sebi, “Regulatory instruments to protect the commons: An experimental investigation”, Environmental and Resource Economics, vol. 58, n. 2, June 2014, pp. 219–244.

Reference

Stefan Ambec, Alexis Garapin, Laurent Muller, Arnaud Reynaud, and Carine Sebi, “Comparing Regulations to Protect the Commons: An Experimental Investigation”, TSE Working Paper, n. 09-100, October 23, 2009.