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Author ORCID Identifier
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Resource Economics
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Angela C.M. de Oliveira
Second Advisor
John M. Spraggon
Third Advisor
Simon D. Halliday
Subject Categories
Agricultural and Resource Economics | Behavioral Economics | Public Economics
Abstract
Social dilemmas are settings where the interest of the individual is at odds with those of society i.e. overharvesting in a fishery, not contributing to a public good. These dilemmas are widespread and take myriad forms with public goods and common-pool resources being the most prominent ones. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how individual behavior is impacted by the presence of uncertainty in public goods and common-pool resources. These dilemmas exhibit two types of uncertainty, strategic and environmental. Strategic uncertainty refers to uncertainty about the actions of other individuals facing the dilemma i.e. will other individuals contribute to the public good or not. Environmental uncertainty pertains to uncertainty about the characteristics of the dilemma i.e. is the resource size large or small. While strategic uncertainty has been extensively examined, the existing research on environmental uncertainty is limited. Since the social dilemmas in the real-world are often marked by environmental uncertainty, policy-makers need to know how individual behavior in social dilemmas is impacted by environmental uncertainty. The dissertation utilizes laboratory experiments to study the issue because laboratory experiments allow us to implement different forms of environmental uncertainty, which would not be possible in the field.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/15143457
Recommended Citation
Kidwai, Abdul, "THREE ESSAYS ON UNCERTAINTY IN SOCIAL DILEMMAS" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1703.
https://doi.org/10.7275/15143457
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1703
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
Agricultural and Resource Economics Commons, Behavioral Economics Commons, Public Economics Commons