This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Social dilemmas characterize environments in which individuals' exclusive pursuit of their own material self-interest can produce inefficient aggregate outcomes. Two such environments are those characterized by public goods and common pool resources, in which the social dilemmas can be manifested in free riding and tragedy of the commons outcomes. In public goods games, individuals decide how much of their endowments to contribute to the public good. In common-pool resource games, individuals decide how much to withdraw from the common-pool. In both settings, group resources are undermined if decision makers act non-cooperatively. Much field and laboratory research has focused on the effectiveness of alternative political-economic institutions in counteracting individuals' tendencies to under-provide public goods and over-exploit common pool resources. Previous research, however, has not focused on the implications of power asymmetries in these settings. The research proposed here begins with settings in which agents move simultaneously, without knowledge of other agents' actions. The settings are designed for pair-wise comparisons in which payoff consequences of alternative strategies are held constant across treatments. This initial analysis allows us to examine behavioral differences across public good and common pool settings that are linked to asymmetries in norms of behavior, as opposed to differences in payoff consequences of strategies. The research then moves to experiments with pairs of sequential move games in which second movers with asymmetric power make their decisions after first movers. The opportunities for these "bosses and kings" to exploit cooperative choices of first movers is systematically varied across design settings. The central questions are whether the powers associated with these bosses and kings lead to exploitation, and to what extent this power has significant effects on the willingness of first movers to behave cooperatively. We examine whether these effects differ across the paired public good and common pool resource settings. This research provides important insights into how community collective action depends critically on the design of institutions that allows for transparency, as well as control over the exploitive powers associated with agents with administrative control. It will also yield important insights into how decision makers' norms of behavior may be importantly linked to the structure of the social dilemma and how such norms interact with institutions designed to facilitate cooperation.
