Intergenerational sustainability of common pool resources: Theoretical and experimental approaches

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K13362
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Economic policy
• Research Institution: Kochi University of Technology
• Principal Investigator: Kotani Koji 高知工科大学, 経済・マネジメント学群, 教授 (80422583)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 共有資源 / 異世代間 / 向社会性 / 持続性

Outline of Final Research Achievements

We have conducted a series of experiments to examine intergenerational sustainability of common pool resource (CPR) use. We sought to characterize what kind of people have tendencies to sustain CPR longer and what kind of new mechanisms are effective to induce sustainable use of CPR under intergenerational settings. We find that prosociality of people is a key to explain the intergenerational sustainability. It is demonstrated that the sustainability become higher when people are prosocial. We also find that people in rural areas are prosocial, while those in urban areas are proself, explaining that people in urban areas cannot sustain CPR or exhaust the resources. However, we identify a few new social mechanisms, such as future thought experiments, that induce people in urban areas to sustain CPR much longer.

Free Research Field

環境経済学