The Survival of the Conformist: Social Pressure and Renewable Resource Management

This paper examines the role of pro-social behavior as a mechanism for the establishment and maintenance of cooperation in resource use under variable social and environmental conditions. By coupling resource stock dynamics with social dynamics concerning compliance to a social norm prescribing non-excessive resource extraction in a common pool resource (CPR), we show that when reputational considerations matter and a sufficient level of social stigma affects the violators of a norm, sustainable outcomes are achieved. We find large parameter regions where norm-observing and norm-violating types coexist, and analyze to what extent such coexistence depends on the environment.

Keywords: Cooperation, Social Norm, Ostracism, Common Pool Resource, Evolutionary Game Theory, Replicator Equation, Agent-based Simulation, Coupled Socio-resource Dynamics

JEL Classification: C73, Q20, D70

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Tavoni, Alessandro and Schlüter, Maja and Schlüter, Maja and Levin, Simon, The Survival of the Conformist: Social Pressure and Renewable Resource Management (November 15, 2010). FEEM Working Paper No. 127.2010, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1709313 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1709313