Ours, not yours: Property rights, poaching and deterrence in common-pool resources

Governments allocate property rights in different ways to protect common-pool resources (CPR) from over-harvesting, but this can generate conflict between those with access (“insiders”) and those without (“outsiders”). We use a laboratory experiment to determine how mechanisms to allocate property rights influence the decentralized management and defense of a CPR. We first vary whether CPR property rights are earned or randomly assigned. Insiders (subjects holding the property rights) decide how much to harvest from the CPR. Outsiders observe the insiders’ harvest and then choose how much to poach from the CPR. We also vary whether insiders have the ability to deter outsiders with costly punishment after observing poaching. We find that insiders who earned the property right were more likely to defend the CPR and impose significantly more punishment, leading to a significant reduction in extreme poaching. However, lower levels of poaching often went unpunished under both earned and assigned rights. While earned property rights can improve the coordinated deterrence of outsiders, they are insufficient to completely eliminate poaching, and conflict between rights-holders and poachers.