How Norms Help Reduce the Tragedy of the Commons: A Multi-Layer Framework for Analyzing Field Experiments

Abstract

Contemporary economic theory is one of the more successful, empirically verified social science theories to explain human behavior. It does best, however, in the settings for which it was developed – the exchange of private goods and services in an open, competitive market. The theory is based on a theory of goods, a set of rules for social exchange, and a model of human behavior. When the goods involved are easily excludable and rivalrous, and individuals are interacting in a competitive market, theoretical predictions have strong empirical support. When the goods involved are not easy to exclude – such as public goods or common-pool resources (CPRs) – conventional theoretical predictions receive much less empirical support. In a static setting, the conventional predictions are that individuals will not produce public goods and that they will overharvest common-pool resources. The evidence for both predictions is mixed.