Environmental uncertainty in commons dilemmas: a survey of experimental research

Abstract

We conducted a systematic review of experimental resource dilemma studies that manipulated environmental uncertainty. We classify the collected studies according to whether the incentives reflected a coordination or a cooperation problem. We provide, for each type of incentive, a general overview of the strategic setting and its adaptation to the experimental paradigm. We find that, regardless of the type of incentives, environmental uncertainty has an efficiency-diminishing effect in most of the experimental settings. We also present and discuss a selective set of experiments mimicking the climate change problem, in which the proposed incentives combine elements from coordination and cooperation problems. We conclude with a general discussion of the findings about how different sources of environmental uncertainty affect efficiency in collective action problems, paying special attention to climate change issues.

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