Search

This paper analyses people's decision to snatch flowers which are marketed via the honour system. If people were to make a narrow rational choice that they would snatch the unattended flowers, the market would collapse. We find that actual payment rates vary substantially between individuals. The decision to snatch relies on internalised values and norms ('internal deltas'). The econometric analysis of the impact of socio-demographic variables on payment rates provides a first indication that differences in socialisation processes lead to different internal deltas. Oxford University Press and Foundation for the European Review of Agricultural Economics 2010; all rights reserved. For permissions, please email journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.

The commons literature increasingly recognizes the importance of contextual factors in driving collaboration in governance systems. Of particular interest are the ways in which the attributes of a resource system influence the dynamics of cooperation. While this may occur through many pathways, we investigate the mechanisms by which ecological factors influence both the risk of cooperation as well as the density of networks in which strategic interactions take place. Both of these factors influence the co-evolutionary dynamics of network structure and cooperative behavior. These dynamics are investigated through agent-based simulations, which provide preliminary evidence that: 1) low-density networks support higher levels of cooperation, even in high-risk Prisoner's Dilemma scenarios; and 2) in high-risk scenarios, networks that develop higher levels of clustering generally enjoy higher societal gains.