2002 World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists

We study conditions for the emergence of cooperation in a spatial common-pool resource game. A fixed number of harvesters are located on a spatial grid. Harvesters are distributed among three strategies: defection, cooperation and enforcement. Enforcers punish all defectors located in their neighborhood. Individual payoffs are affected by both global factors, namely aggregate harvest and resource stock level, and local factors, namely sanctioning among neighbors. Evolution of strategies in the population is driven by social learning through imitation. We identify numerous equilibria in the system. An important finding is that clusters of cooperators and enforcers can survive among large groups of defectors. We discuss how our results contrast with the non-spatial, but otherwise similar, game of Sethi and Somanathan (1996).



	Paper Title:	Spatial Evolution Of Social Norms In A Common-Pool Resource Game
	Presenting Author:	Joelle Noailly (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
	Coauthor 1:	Jeroen Van Den
	Coauthor 2:	Cees Withagen
	Coauthor 3:
	Abstract:	We study conditions for the emergence of cooperation in a spatial common-pool resource game. A fixed number of harvesters are located on a spatial grid. Harvesters are distributed among three strategies: defection, cooperation and enforcement. Enforcers punish all defectors located in their neighborhood. Individual payoffs are affected by both global factors, namely aggregate harvest and resource stock level, and local factors, namely sanctioning among neighbors. Evolution of strategies in the population is driven by social learning through imitation. We identify numerous equilibria in the system. An important finding is that clusters of cooperators and enforcers can survive among large groups of defectors. We discuss how our results contrast with the non-spatial, but otherwise similar, game of Sethi and Somanathan (1996).
	Link to paper:	http://weber.ucsd.edu/~carsonvs/papers/456.pdf

	Session / Day / Time	1I / Monday / 8:00 - 10:00 am

	Please use your browser's "back" button to get to the previous page.