Covenants with and without a Sword: Self-Governance Is Possible

Abstract

Contemporary political theory often assumes that individuals cannot make credible commitments where substantial temptations exist to break them unless such commitments are enforced by an external agent. One such situation may occur in relation to common pool resources, which are natural or man-made resources whose yield is subtractable and whose exclusion is nontrivial (but not necessarily impossible). Examples include fisheries, forests, grazing ranges, irrigation systems, and groundwater basins. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that appropriators in common pool resources develop credible commitments in many cases without relying on external authorities. We present findings from a series of experiments exploring (1) covenants alone (both one-shot and repeated communication opportunities); (2) swords alone (repeated opportunities to sanction each other); and (3) covenants combined with an internal sword (one-shot communication followed by repeated opportunities to sanction each other).

Regulating the Regulation

“…This assumption has been shown to be invalid in a large number of experiments in which participants in social dilemmas have been given the option to contribute to the punishment of others at a cost to themselves; a robust finding is that a substantial proportion of participants voluntarily do so (e.g., Fehr & Gächter 2002;Ostrom, Walker & Gardner 1992;Yamagishi 1986). Thus, it seems that no enforcement is needed for a substantial proportion of people to be willing to engage in punishment of others.…”

Credible Enforcement Policies Under Illegal Fishing: Does Individual Transferable Quotas Induce to Reduce the Gap Between Approved and Proposed Allowable Catches?

“…Ostrom et al (1992) showed the existence of punishment opportunities in a common-pool resource use game. The fear of punishment has a positive effect on cooperation.…”

Why Do We Need Laboratory Experiments in Political Science?

“…All sanctioning experiments used the 25-token design since appropriations had been much higher in this design (Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner, 1992). Subjects played ten rounds of the baseline game modified so that the individual contributions in each round were reported as well as the total outcomes.…”

“…In this set of experiments, subjects were able to increase their returns from the CPR modestly to 39 percent of maximum, but when the costs of fees and fines were subtracted from the total, these gains are wiped out. When subjects were given a single opportunity to communicate prior to the implementation of sanctioning capabilities, they were able to gain an average of 85 percent of the maximum payoffs (69 percent when the costs of the fees and fines were subtracted) (see Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner, 1992;Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker, 1994).…”

“…Four out of six experimental groups adopted a covenant in which they specified the number of tokens they would invest and the level of fines to be imposed. The fines determined by the participants ranged in size from $.10 to $1.00 (Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner, 1992).…”