Motivational levers for the preservation of an intergenerational common resource: An experiment

Abstract

Preserving natural resources for future generations lies at the heart of sustainable development practices, and is yet difficult to motivate for a self-interested present. We propose a laboratory experiment investigating collective motivations for resource conservation in intergenerational CPRs. We apply three behavioral levers. First, we generate intertemporal communities composed of members distributed across cohorts (V-Links). Second, we introduce a tax on overextraction that does not change material incentives but signals conditional cooperation intentions. Finally, we implement a savings technology that improves the resource's resilience to future extractive shocks. We draw on the philosophical literature of collective motivations, connecting extractors to social constructs larger than themselves. Empirically, we find that each lever succeeds in improving coordination in the CPR game. This is useful because it implies that intertemporal links can be replaced by direct conditional cooperation connections with the current generation or by the salience of the resource itself, both of which might be easier to establish. We also find that in the presence of the intertemporal link, the other levers are not necessary, which suggests, for policy, that targeting one lever might be more effective than trying to activate several.