Regeneration of Common Pool Resources

In this article we present the results of a hybrid experimental game which was constructed by combining the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism of the Public Goods Game with the Trust Game. The new model was used to capture regeneration of Common Pool Resources (CPRs) by community members through voluntary actions, without any binding contract or monitoring. The experiment was conducted with rural subjects from Sagar and Bali Islands of the Indian Sundarbans. The results show that in contradiction to the theoretical predictions, there was high degree of voluntary contribution towards generation of common group funds (representing the CPR) and moderately high return (representing refraining from over-exploitation of the CPR) in the trust game.