Innovation of institutional rules in the governance of common resources

NSF Grant within Innovation and Organizational Sciences program and the Decision, Risk, and Management Science program

PI: Marco Janssen

Management of shared or “common pool” resources – like shared grazing or fishing grounds -- is a hard problem.  The possibility that some parties will overconsume, pollute or otherwise damage the resource as they extract their personal value from it is always present. To date, researchers have identified basic principles for how humans organize themselves to govern common resources, but these are mostly static principles. This project seeks aims to develop a next-generation understanding: what makes groups successful in changing the institutional rules that govern behavior related to common resources?

Group experiments and agent-based modeling techniques will be used to test how people create formal rules as they interact and how and why rule sets evolve.  The spatially explicit real-time experimental environment will allow researchers to test the crafting of formal rules for diverse types of ecologies. Data from experiments are used to develop agent-based models to examine institutional evolution and adaptation in a wider set of typologies of ecologies and constitutional arrangements.

As part of this CAREER project, simulated, visually compelling, common pool environments will be created for subjects to use during experiments.  These simulations will be adapted for educational use.  They will enable students to learn more about common pools, to learn relevant computations, and to learn to craft governance mechanisms in complex social situations. 

The project can be seen as a follow up of "Dynamics of Rules in Commons Dilemmas" project, but with a focus on the formation of formal rules under different constitutional arrangements and ecologies.

Current activities:

With Allen Lee and Seema Talele a website is under development where one can find the software for the Dynamics of Rules project with tutorials on how to use it. We launch this as an open source project so that we can join forces with other research groups to develop additional versions.

With undergraduate students Clint Bushman and David Lees a simulation model is under development that uses shedding type of card games, like UNO, as a fruitfly to study the evolution of rules.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.