Regular Article
Common Pool Resource Appropriation under Costly Cooperation☆

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Abstract

In addition to the usual fixed costs, we introduce variable costs in a community's effort to cooperate in extracting from a common pool resource. Using a standard supervision mechanism, these variable costs are shown to be an increasing function of individual members' incentives to default. The model explains why we frequently observe communities that all cooperate and have relatively similar resource endowments, and yet achieve very different levels of extraction.

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    ☆

    The authors are grateful for comments received from Antonio Ciccone, Ethan Ligon, and Leo Simon.

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    To whom correspondence should be addressed.

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