About This Project

Sustainability of natural resources is one of the most serious challenges facing humanity today. We propose to test the hypothesis that all-female groups are better at sustaining common pool resources than all-male groups, which in turn are better than mixed groups. We will conduct an experiment with participants playing a common-pool resource (CPR) game in the laboratory.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Recent studies have found correlations between different individual characteristics and various forms of cooperation. For example, individuals from collectivist cultures are much more cooperative when facing common-pool resource problems (CPRs) than those from individualistic cultures. However, gender has largely been ignored in the examination of CPRs. Few studies that did consider gender as one of the explanatory variables provide only inconsistent evidence. Findings from social psychology and experimental economics suggest that females have stronger propensity to cooperate than males, which for CPRs would emphasize the importance of gender composition for sustainability problems.

What is the significance of this project?

It is important for policymakers to know which group structures evoke cooperative or opportunistic behavior in CPR situations. By using this information strategically, sustainable use of common-pool resources, which is seen as one of the major challenges for this century, can be fostered. Researchers that conducted field experiments in Costa Rica, Nepal, and India reveal that women are still underrepresented in the main decision-making bodies of community resource institutions. The evidence in support of our hypothesis will highlight the importance of involving women in policy-making related to environmental sustainability.

What are the goals of the project?

The goal of this project is to test the effect of group’s gender composition on the management of CPRs. We will test our hypotheses by having all-male and all-female groups play a CPR game in the laboratory. In each period participants can choose the amount of common resource to extract. The remaining resource then regrows before the extraction in the next period unless it is depleted. Our variable of interest is the number of periods before the depletion of the resource. We will test our hypothesis that all-female groups sustain the resource longer than all-male groups followed by mixed-gender groups. Our control groups are the mixed-gender groups from the existing dataset published in 2015 by Kimbrough and Vostroknutov.