Centralized common-pool management and local community participation

We use common-pool resource experiments to explore whether allowing resource users to vote on a natural resource management institution’s incentive structure enhances the efficiency of resource use. We hypothesize that voting enables users to communicate their willingness to limit excess resource exploitation. Compared to games in which appropriate incentives are imposed exogenously, behavior is more cooperative conditional on a majority having voted for that structure. However, the effectiveness of this form of local community participation in resource management is limited as in more than half of the cases, only a minority votes in favor of implementing that incentive structure.