Abstract
In this chapter, I investigate through a public good in rural Colombia how different institutional arrangements, particularly different external regulations, with a common characteristic—an external regulator with a weak enforcement capacity—derive into different contributions and compliances. I tested two monetary regulations and found that high penalties very often do more harm than good. I also found that low penalties and public and private reminders were very effective at increasing cooperation and rule compliance.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This article was operationalized in 1993 with the implementation of Law 70.
- 3.
Dominant Nash strategy is a term used in game theory to describe a situation in which each player in a game who only considers his or her self-interest is making the best decision that he or she can, while considering the decisions of others.
- 4.
Each participant in the group was identified for the whole section with a participant number of 1–5.
- 5.
In July 2006, when the experiments were conducted, one US dollar was equivalent to 2,500 Colombian pesos. A day’s wage in the fishery industry in Buenaventura was about 12,000 pesos.
- 6.
Instructions and forms are available upon request.
- 7.
In the regulations treatments, it was possible to get negative earnings. However, since the probability of inspection was low, we did not encounter any case of a participant having negative earnings at the end of the experiment.
- 8.
Performing a Wald test.
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I am particularly grateful to Juana Murillo from Instituto Colombiano de Desarrollo Rural, (INCODER) who made these experiments possible. The funding to do these experiments came from INCODER and WWF-Colombia. Carmen Candelo, Julian Caicedo, and Ana Maria Roldan from WWF-Colombia gave important insights about the fishery in Buenaventura and helped design the survey. The fieldwork was done with the support of Ana Maria Roldan, Juan Carlos Rocha, and Pablo Ramos. The experiments would not have been possible without the help of the community councils of Buenaventura.
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Lopez, M.C. (2013). Conservation of Natural Resources: Which Matters – Having a Regulation or the Size of the Penalty Imposed?. In: Brondízio, E., Moran, E. (eds) Human-Environment Interactions. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4780-7_10
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