Investigating the Effect of Different Institutional Arrangements in a Behavioral Irrigation Experiment with Power Asymmetries

The economy is full of opportunities through which individuals have to decide under different rules. Modeling individuals' behaviors under these additional rules are pursued in experimental economics. The present paper addresses some of the critical institutional questions in governance in the Iranian economy, using experimental economics. The data were collected and created out of 480 simulation runs of joint pool resource harvesting where resource users had asymmetric power for harvesting the resource. Alternative institutional arrangements, each representing different governance of natural resources, were simulated in these experiments. This paper concentrates on the three factors of harvesters' communication, the origin of regulations (the harvesters or the government), and rule enforcement (the amount and probability of violators' fines). The results indicate that in the situations where participants are allowed to regulate, harvesting the natural resource is equal to where the government is in charge of regulating. For an external regulation, the worst way to harvest it is when the government fails to guarantee the rule enforcement (the probability of a fine is low). Under such circumstances, resource harvesting is even more unequal than the open-access state. Exogenous regulation leads to crowding-out altruistic motivations.