Voluntary, incentive-based policies are often offered to resource users address the overexploitation of common property resources. Spillovers from these have important implications for policy effectiveness. Considering different externalities that can affect producers’ irrigation decisions, we investigate whether permanently retiring groundwater rights impacts use among active neighboring users...

When economic activity leads to pollution and over-use of common property resources, government intervention can improve social welfare. Pollution involves a market failure in which damages caused by a producer or consumer are imposed on third parties. These damages can involve personal health, physical deterioration of buildings, and foregone options for the future. Of course, if transactions ...

The distribution of economic benefits from wetlands is fundamentally determined by ownership and control of resources, and hence the property rights and institutional setting of analysis is critical in determining the ecological sustainability of management practices. In the last decade it has been recognised that wetlands, in common with many coastal resources can, given certain circumstances,...

Resource-based theory implicitly assumes that property rights to resources are secure. Extant property rights theory enables us to relax this assumption to take into account processes where there are struggles in establishing property rights that enhance the realized economic value of resources. A case study of oil field unitization (where a single firm is designated as unit operator to develop...

In an optimal growth setting, where the only productive asset is a renewable resource which is jointly exploited, it is shown that competitively the resource may be over-used or under-used. The diversion from optimal use arises due to the externality embodied in the jointness of exploitation and would intuit over-use. Surprisingly, under-use has been derived as an equilibrium phenomenon by Dutt...

It is common to find in experimental data persistent oscillations in the aggregate outcomes and high levels of heterogeneity in individual behavior. Furthermore, it is not unusual to find significant deviations from aggregate Nash equilibrium predictions. In this paper, we employ an evolutionary model with boundedly rational agents to explain these findings. We use data from common property res...