Common-pool resources are resources, either natural or man-made, where it is costly to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from their use. As a result of the work of numerous scholars, many presume that when individuals jointly use such resources, each individual is driven by an immutable logic to withdraw more of the resource units than is optimal from the perspective of all users. Individuals are presumed to face a tragic situation in which their individual rationality leads to an outcome that is not group rational. There is considerable empirical evidence not consistent with this presumption. Building on their prior research, the investigators are exploring the extent to which the presence of suitable institutions allows individuals to escape from common-pool resource dilemmas, so that these resources survive into the future and are exploited efficiently. The project is multidisciplinary in scope, comprising faculty from economics and political science. The project aims to broaden our understanding of the role of institutions in the survival and efficiency of common-pool resources using the techniques of institutional analysis and game theory at the theoretical level, and field case studies, coupled with controlled laboratory experiments, at the empirical level. The attempt to rebuild and sharpen existing theory proceeds with the understanding that the effort must retain the important theoretical insights already gained, while revising the theory so that it can be used to generate different predictions in different institutional settings, which are themselves integrated into the theory. Instead of ad hoc explanations for why some common- pool resources are destroyed and others are not, the investigators offer a body of theory that tells under what conditions destruction does or does not take place.
