Experimental Investigation of Voting over Common Pool Resources

Common pool resource systems are governed by a wide variety of institutions designed to promote long run resource viability. Relatively little work has focused on the use of majority rule voting in managing resource stocks. This paper develops a theoretical and experimental framework for assessing the efficiency of majority rule voting in allocating appropriation rights to a group of resource users. By varying the distribution of individual capacities to appropriate, but keeping the aggregate level constant, we find that systems dominated by large scale appropriators collectively extract more of the resource than systems dominated by small scale appropriators, whether or not voting is used. When voting is used, the resulting policies are more extractive under systems dominated by large scale appropriators.