IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp12-20.html

Insiders, outsiders, and the adaptability of informal rules to ecological shocks

Author

Abstract

The history of the world is strewn with the remains of societies whose institutions failed to adapt to ecological change, but the determinants of institutional fragility are difficult to identify in the historical record. We report a laboratory experiment that explores the impact of an exogenous ecological shock on the informal rules of property and exchange. We find that geographically induced tribal sentiments, which are unobservable in the historical record, impede adaptation post-shock and that inequality declines as wealth and sociableness increase. Quantitative measures of individual and group sociality account for some of the differences in successful or failed adaptation.

Suggested Citation

  • Erik O. Kimbrough & Bart J. Wilson, 2012. "Insiders, outsiders, and the adaptability of informal rules to ecological shocks," Discussion Papers dp12-20, Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University.
    • Handle: RePEc:sfu:sfudps:dp12-20
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sfu.ca/repec-econ/sfu/sfudps/dp12-20.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Karolina Safarzynska, 2018. "The Impact of Resource Uncertainty and Intergroup Conflict on Harvesting in the Common-Pool Resource Experiment," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 71(4), pages 1001-1025, December.
    2. Taylor Jaworski & Bart J. Wilson, 2013. "Go West Young Man: Self‐Selection and Endogenous Property Rights," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 79(4), pages 886-904, April.
    3. Kotsakou, Stamatina & Walters, Cory & Banerjee, Simanti, "undated". "Successful Extension Meetings and Innovative Economic Research: Grain Marketing Simulations," Cornhusker Economics 306947, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Department of Agricultural Economics.
    4. Bart Wilson, 2015. "Further towards a theory of the emergence of property," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 163(1), pages 201-222, April.
    5. Marco A. Janssen & Therese Lindahl & James J. Murphy, 2015. "Advancing the Understanding of Behavior in Social-Ecological Systems: Results from Lab and Field Experiments," Working Papers 2015-05, University of Alaska Anchorage, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments
    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
    • Q2 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sfu:sfudps:dp12-20. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Working Paper Coordinator (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/desfuca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.