Abstract:
The urgency of climate, biodiversity, and pollution crises has prompted international and national institutions to go beyond the prevention and mitigation of damages and to try to design policies capable of promoting ecological restoration. In this paper, we address this emerging policy challenge by presenting experimental evidence on individuals' propensity to contribute to restoration activities. Specifically, our design connects a common pool resource game to a public good game in order to investigate how previous exploitation of a resource conditions restoration decisions. We find that history matters since the condition of the resource inherited from the past produces a variety of behavioral responses. Regardless of efficiency, when subjects are not responsible for the exploitation of the resource they tend to participate more in restoration. On the contrary, behavioral lock-ins risk preventing the success of restoration when subjects take part in the exploitation of the resource.
Speaker: Pietro Guarnieri (https://sites.google.com/ec.unipi.it/pietroguarnieri/)
