R. Suleiman et al., FIXED POSITION AND PROPERTY-RIGHTS IN SEQUENTIAL RESOURCE DILEMMAS UNDER UNCERTAINTY, Acta psychologica, 93(1-3), 1996, pp. 229-245
Considered in this paper is a noncooperative n-person resource dilemma
game in which players can share a common and uncertain resource whose
probability distribution is common knowledge. Making their requests f
rom the pool privately with no preplay communication, individuals are
granted their requests if, and only if, the total group request does n
ot exceed the value of the unknown resource. We investigate this game
under the sequential protocol of play and show that if positions in th
e sequence are fixed for all stage games and commonly known, the threa
t of retaliation against players requesting disproportionally large sh
ares is sufficient to induce a more egalitarian distribution of reques
ts. Acquisition of property rights, which is hypothesized to induce mo
re skewed request distributions, was ineffective, presumably because o
f the relatively large group size, or lack of outcome feedback.