Talk Organised by CSTEP
Lecture on Voluntary Contribution in the Field: An Experiment in the
Indian Himalayas
Date: April 19, 2011
Venue: Bangalore
Sujoy Chakravarty from JNU, E. Somanathan from Indian Statistical Institute, CarineSebi from
Centre de Science Humaines and Emmanuel Theophilus delivered a lecture at CSTEP on
Voluntary Contribution in the Field: An Experiment in the Indian Himalayas.
Abstract:
The public goods problem (Hardin, 1968), either viewed as a problem of extraction and optimal
use of a resource, or that of shared contributions to the cost of a resource, has had a long history
in the social sciences. Public goods, such as water resources, clean air and urban infrastructure
are those that are non-excludable and non-rival in consumption. In such a situation it is possible
that individual incentives lead to unregulated (over) consumption or (under) contribution.
However, if everybody behaves to individually optimize their use of the resource, it leads to
degradation of the resource and ultimately to lower levels of welfare for the population at large.
Hardin refers to this breakdown of collective action as the “tragedy of the commons.”
We conduct a field experiment using a standard Voluntary Contributions Mechanism (VCM,
Isaac and Walker 1988) game in the Gori-Ganga Basin of the Central Himalayas, where collective
action is deemed an important driver behind consumption and production. Our objective is to
study the determinants of collective action, i.e. – to study whether or not some demographic
groups contribute more than others to a common pool. From the behaviour in our experiment
we find that individual contribution to the common pool is determined by gender, age, caste,
literacy and the history of cooperation in the experiment. However, face-to-face communication
is not seen to increase average individual contribution to the common pool.