Shut Up and Fish: The Role of Communication when Output- Sharing is used to Manage a Common Pool Resource

Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons” can be overcome when individuals share their output equally in groups of optimal size and there is no communication. The assignment to groups as either strangers or partners does not significantly affect this outcome. In this paper we investigate whether communication changes these results. Communication reduces shirking, increases aggregate effort and reduces aggregate rents, but only when communication and output-sharing groups are linked. The effect is stronger for fixedmembership output-sharing groups (the partner treatment) than for output-sharing groups with randomly reassigned members (the stranger treatment). Performance is not distinguishable from the no-communication treatments when communication is present but groups are sharing output within groups other than the groups within which they communicate. Communication also tends to enhance the negative effect of the partnered group assignment on the equality of individual payoffs.