Section 3: Mukand Flashcards
(48 cards)
Rustagi et al. (2010)
Conditional cooperation and costly monitoring explain success in forest commons management
Motivation: Rustagi et al. (2010) - Conditional cooperation and costly monitoring explain success in forest commons management
Forest-user groups differ dramatically in how well they protect common woodland. Classic free-rider theory can’t explain such variation. The authors test whether the mix of behavioural types—especially the share of conditional cooperators and their willingness to monitor & punish—accounts for success.
Data/Setting: Rustagi et al. (2010) - Conditional cooperation and costly monitoring explain success in forest commons management
49 forest-user groups (679 villagers) in Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains. Outcomes are ecological (health of young trees) and behavioural (patrol hours). Each villager is classified via a public-goods “strategy method” game into a conditional co-operator, weak CC, free-rider, or altruist.
Methodology: Rustagi et al. (2010) - Conditional cooperation and costly monitoring explain success in forest commons management
Regress forest health on the share of conditional cooperators, with controls for geography, demographics and programme years
Regress patrol hours on CCshare & same controls.
Robustness Checks: Rustagi et al. (2010) - Conditional cooperation and costly monitoring explain success in forest commons management
Results robust to full set of geographic & demographic controls.
Structural factors (e.g., distance to market, year of enrolment) entered separately; CCshare effect persists.
Free-rider share included: more free-riders and significantly lower PCT, confirming opposite channel.
Alternative outcome specifications (e.g., patrol hours, forest plot fixed effects) yield similar elasticities.
Results: Rustagi et al. (2010) - Conditional cooperation and costly monitoring explain success in forest commons management
Forests thrive when many villagers are conditional cooperators—these groups patrol more and suffer less from free-riding—whereas a higher share of free-riders undermines monitoring and degrades forest health.
Greif (1994)
Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies
Motivation: Greif (1994) - Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies
Why did the Maghribi Jewish coalition and the Genoese—trading the same goods on the same Mediterranean routes—adopt opposite ways to keep agents honest? Greif shows that shared cultural beliefs about others’ behaviour (individualist vs collectivist) dictate which enforcement institutions are feasible and, in turn, steer long-run trajectories.
Data/Setting: Greif (1994) - Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies
Maghribi evidence: Cairo Geniza letters and account books describe coalition-wide boycotts of any agent who cheated even once.
Genoese evidence: Notarial contracts reveal high incentive wages, reliance on courts and no collective-punishment norm.
Both groups traded identical goods over the same Mediterranean routes, so technology, geography and product mix cannot explain their institutional split.
Methodology: Greif (1994) - Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies
Greif re-casts the merchant–agent relationship as a repeated principal–agent game with hidden action. Two self-enforcing equilibria emerge, each anchored in a cultural belief system:
Collectivist: everyone expects peers to punish a cheater, so reputational ostracism (a boycott) keeps agents honest at low cost.
Individualist: nobody expects peer punishment, so honesty must be bought with high wages and backed by courts.
A collectivist equilibrium is sustainable only when the prior belief that “others will punish” is strong enough; otherwise the individualist system prevails.
Robustness Checks: Greif (1994) - Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies
Common context rules out geography, product mix, technology.
Archival triangulation—letters, ledgers and court contracts—avoids single-source bias.
Prediction match: boycott vows, network structure and wage patterns align with model.
Scale test: collective enforcement weakens as networks grow, mirroring Maghribi decline and Genoese resilience.
Alternative channels (legal capacity, market power) assessed and found insufficient once beliefs are included.
Results: Greif (1994) - Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies
Cultural beliefs shape institutions and long-run development. Maghribis’ shared expectation that “everybody boycotts a cheater” sustains low-cost, reputation-based trade—but it remains fragile when the community scales up.
Genoese scepticism about peer punishment drives them toward costly wage incentives and formal legal contracts, which are durable and scalable. These contrasting enforcement regimes steer network structure, contract form and economic trajectories for centuries.
Motivation: Ostrom et al. (1999) - Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges
Hardin’s “tragedy” argued that common-pool resources must be privatised or nationalised to avoid ruin. Three decades of fieldwork reveal many communities that do conserve forests, fisheries and canals without either extreme. The paper distils why local self-governance sometimes works and probes whether those insights can be adapted to “planetary” commons like climate and oceans.
Ostrom et al. (1999)
Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges
Data / Setting: Ostrom et al. (1999) - Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges
Synthesises hundreds of well-documented cases spanning farmer-run irrigation in Nepal, communal forests in Germany, Mongolian grasslands, Pacific fisheries and more.
Contrasts four property rights regimes (open access, group, private, and state) and reports typical incentives and failure modes.
Successful systems consistently exhibit eight design principles—e.g., clear boundaries, user monitoring, graduated sanctions, and nested layers of governance.
Methodology: Ostrom et al. (1999) - Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges
Conducts a qualitative meta-analysis: compares successful and failed commons, codes which design principles are present, and matches institutional fit to ecological performance. The authors then extend the framework to global resources, identifying five extra hurdles—scale, cultural diversity, interlinked systems, rapid change and treaty unanimity—and argue for polycentric solutions that embed local knowledge in multiple tiers.
Robustness Checks: Ostrom et al. (1999) - Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges
Cross-ecosystem consistency – the same eight principles recur in forests, fisheries, irrigation and groundwater.
Predictive power – cases missing several principles almost always collapse; those with most principles endure over decades or centuries.
Comparative counter-examples – top-down Soviet grassland schemes and poorly tailored market fixes degraded resources faster, highlighting the cost of ignoring local context.
Behavioural foundations – lab evidence on conditional cooperation and reciprocal punishment supports the need for cheap monitoring and flexible sanctions.
Scalability probe – nested, information-sharing governance already underpins successful regional water treaties, suggesting the principles can scale when properly layered
Results: Ostrom et al. (1999) - Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges
Local self-governance works—and the paper illustrates this with concrete cases:
Nepalese farmer-managed canals keep water flowing equitably and achieve richer crop rotations than nearby state-engineered concrete canals.
German communal forests have delivered steady timber yields for generations while preserving tree regeneration.
Pacific island reef fisheries use seasonal closures and community quotas to keep stocks healthy and catches stable.
Across such cases, user-crafted rules, mutual monitoring and gentle but credible sanctions allow commons users to match or outperform state or private managers. Governing global resources is harder, but the authors argue that polycentric, multi-level arrangements that embed the same eight principles at higher scales give the best chance of averting twenty-first-century “tragedies.”
Almås et al. (2022)
Attitudes to Inequality: Preferences and Beliefs
Motivation: Almås et al. (2022) - Attitudes to Inequality: Preferences and Beliefs
Public debate dwells on how big income gaps are, yet citizens mostly care whether the gap feels fair. The authors, therefore ask:
(i) Which sources of inequality (luck, effort, choice) people deem legitimate
(ii) whether fairness can outweigh self-interest and efficiency
(iii) how fairness views and the stories people tell about success vary across countries, income classes and life stages.
Data / Setting: Almås et al. (2021) - Attitudes to Inequality: Preferences and Beliefs
An impartial-spectator experiment run with a nationally representative sample in roughly sixty countries, plus deep dives in the U.S., Norway and a dedicated youth panel.
Spectators allocate money between two real online workers after one of three treatments: Luck (lottery decides who earns), Merit (higher performer earns), Efficiency-cost (luck gap, but every transfer destroys half the pie).
Background survey records income, age, education and detailed beliefs about why the rich are rich (hard work, luck, selfishness, family advantages, etc.).
Methodology: Almås et al. (2021) - Attitudes to Inequality: Preferences and Beliefs
The design cleanly separates normative fairness from self-interest because spectators never receive any money themselves.
Choices across the three treatments reveal three stable fairness types—egalitarian (close every gap), meritocratic (respect effort-based gaps) and libertarian (respect all initial earnings).
The authors then link type membership and redistribution support to personal characteristics and country context.
Robustness Checks: Almås et al. (2021) - Attitudes to Inequality: Preferences and Beliefs
Global replication – the fairness-type taxonomy emerges on every continent, though the mix of types shifts predictably with GDP and institutions.
Within-country gradients – lower-income and younger respondents lean more egalitarian; richer or older groups tilt meritocratic or libertarian, even after controlling for gender and schooling.
Efficiency-cost probe – many spectators still erase luck gaps when redistribution burns resources, showing fairness can trump efficiency.
Belief concordance – people who blame wealth on hard work accept merit gaps; those citing luck or selfishness favour equalisation, matching behaviour to stated narratives.
Stability tests – results replicate in follow-up panels and in a separate large youth study, suggesting the preferences are not a one-off survey artefact.
Results: Almås et al. (2021) - Attitudes to Inequality: Preferences and Beliefs
Spectators are generally comfortable with inequality that reflects earned performance, but much less so with gaps created by luck or perceived privilege.
Many are willing to lose some total income to close a gap they view as unfair, confirming that fairness motives can outweigh efficiency concerns.
Across the globe, the population sorts roughly into three similarly sized camps—egalitarians, meritocrats and libertarians—yet richer countries (and richer citizens within countries) lean more meritocratic/libertarian (USA), while poorer contexts see more egalitarians.
Support for government redistribution tracks the share of people who label existing gaps unfair, not the raw size of inequality; shifting the narrative about why the rich are rich, therefore powerfully changes policy attitudes.
