FIXED POSITION AND PROPERTY-RIGHTS IN SEQUENTIAL RESOURCE DILEMMAS UNDER UNCERTAINTY

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.