Research
Escaping the Tragedy of the Commons: Rule Enforcement and Collective Performance for Solving Social Dilemma
(In collaboration with Marc Legrand)
Social dilemma occurs when actors behave opportunistically at the expense of the group’s interests. We develop a model of institutional emergence in a socio-ecological system (SES) to analyze the long-term impact of rule enforcement in collective action on the process of finding sustainable institutions to govern common pool resources. We argue that enforcing the rules increase the likelihood of finding an appropriate institution and decreases the duration of the emergence process. Using the SES framework and the literature on collective action, we propose an agent-based model (ABM) in which resource users collectively design an institution to escape the tragedy of the commons through adaptation, while being subject to monitoring and sanctioning. We find that enforcement has a positive impact on the efficiency of the emergence process, moderated by the cost of enforcement. We offer further theoretical and empirical implications.
Keywords: Socio-ecological systems, Institutions, Collective action, Agent-based model, Sustainability
Double Alignment In Public-Private Partnerships: Specialized Legal Institutions And The Allocation of Residual Income Rights
(In collaboration with Mohammmad Hosseini)
In this study, we examine the relationship between the legal system of an economy and private investment decisions in infrastructure procurement. We argue that making a regulatory framework too specific by introducing specialized laws reduces private investors’ flexibility and discretion. Since managing demand risk, the most salient risk in public-private partnerships (PPP), requires high discretion, we propose that private investors are less willing to take this risk in the presence of specialized, stand-alone PPP laws. We also argue that this negative association is amplified when the specialized law is not clear enough codified as it causes more confusion and thereby necessitates further regulation. Conversely, the broader institutional constraints on the public sector mitigate the negative relationship between PPP law and private risk taken by increasing the perceived level of stability for the law. Our findings also suggest that investors’ previous entries into PPP law economies also extenuate this negative association because they can learn over time how to manage a project under a restrictive legal system. In this study, we use a unique data set of PPP contracts worldwide, from 1996 to 2020, to test our hypotheses. Our study contributes to a better understanding of relationships and interactions between institutional environment and legal system. It also shed light on the links between control rights and risk distribution among partners.