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Harvesting from common resources has been studied through experimental work in the laboratory and in the field. In this paper we report on a dynamic commons experiment, representing a forest, performed with different types of communities of resource users in Thailand and Colombia, as well as student participants. We find that all groups overharvest the resource in the first part of the experiment and that there is no statistical difference between the various types of groups. In the second part of the experiment, participants appropriate the common resource after one of three possible regulations is elected and implemented. There is less overharvesting after the rules are implemented, but there is a significant amount of rule breaking. The surprising finding is that Colombian villagers break the rules of the games more often than other groups, and even more so when they have more trust in members of the community. This observation can be explained by the distrust in externally proposed regulations due to the institutional and cultural context. 3 IntroductionCommunities are frequently able to govern their shared resources despite the temptation to overharvest (Ostrom, 1990). A tragedy of the commons is frequently avoided if resource users have the ability to participate in decision making on regulations and if there is graduated sanctioning, monitoring and enforcement, and trust among the resource users.Notably, external interventions designed to improve the performance of the groups do not seem to lead to better performance. This is also observed in field experiments (Cardenas et al., 2000; Vollan, 2008). One explanation for this is the crowding-out behavior of group-oriented decisions that are initially made because of intrinsic motivations, but due to external interventions, end up with behavior that is more self-oriented. Crowding-out of pro-social behaviors has been found in various social dilemma situations. A classic example is blood donations. Titmuss (1970) found that voluntary arrangements in the UK led to higher quantities and quality of blood donated than the incentive-based US system. Donating blood is often done because of intrinsic motivation, not because of financial rewards.Vollan (2008) found that external interventions that are enabling instead of restricting reduce the likelihood of crowding out. Furthermore, he found that the more people support the new regulation, the higher the compliance.The experiments presented in this study focused on understanding the role that experience with resource management plays on decisions made in a common pool resource game. The experiment was framed as a forestry experiment and performed in rural villages and urban university campuses in Colombia and Thailand. The rural villages had forestry resources, fishery or irrigation as the main common resource uses.In the second stage of the experiment we allow participants to elect one of three possible rules: a lottery, fixed rotation, and quotas, which include a pecuniary penalty on non-compliance. We foun...

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