Rucha Ghate, Suresh Ghate, Elinor Ostrom:
Indigenous Communities, Cooperation and Communication: Taking Experiments to the Field.
Abstract
Much experimental research has been conducted in laboratory settings
on human behavior related to public goods, common-pool resources, and
other social dilemmas. These studies have shown that when subjects
are anonymous and not allowed to communicate, they tend not to
cooperate. However, to the surprise of game theorists, simply allowing
subjects to communicate in a laboratory setting enables them to achieve
far more cooperative outcomes. The replication of the experiment in
laboratory settings in multiple countries as well as in some initial field
experiments has only confirmed this important finding. However, while
carefully conducted laboratory experiments do have strong internal
validity, external validity requires further research beyond the initial field
experiments that researchers have begun to conduct. In this paper, we
report on a series of common-pool-resource field experiments conducted
in eight indigenous communities in India that have very long traditions of
shared norms and mutual trust. We used two experimental designs in all
eight villages: a “no-communication” game where no one was allowed
verbal or written communication and a “communication game” in which
the same five participants were allowed to communicate with each
other at the beginning of each round before making their decisions. The
findings from these field experiments are substantially different from the
findings of similar experiments conducted in experimental laboratories.
Subjects tended to cooperate in the first design even in the absence
of communication. Our findings suggest that the shared norms in these
indigenous communities are so deeply embedded that communication is
not essential to arrive at cooperative decisions. However, communication
does homogenize group and individual outcomes so that communities
that are overly cooperative tend to reduce cooperation slightly while
those showing small deviations in the other direction move toward the
optimal solution.
Keywords: Common-pool Resources; Indigenous Communities; Field