Success and failure of communities managing natural resources: Static and dynamic inefficiencies

This paper presents an analytical framework to help understand why some communities successfully manage their renewable natural resources and some fail to do so. We develop a finite-number-of-player, two-period non-cooperative game, where a community can impose an exogenous amount of sanctions. The model develops a nuanced view on Ostrom's conjecture, stating that, in a common-pool resource it is easier to solve the within-period distributional issue than the between-period conservation problem. We first show that rules preventing dynamic inefficiencies may exist even though static inefficiencies still remain. Second, we show an increase in the initial value of the resource may lower the utility of all users when enforcement mechanisms are bounded. Third, we show that inequalities decrease static inefficiencies but increase dynamic ones.