Common Pool Resource Appropriation under Costly Cooperation

In addition to the usual fixed costs, we introduce variable costs in a communityʹs effort to cooperate in extracting from a common pool resource. Using a standard supervision mechanism, these variable costs are shown to be an increasing function of individual membersʹ incentives to default. The model explains why we frequently observe communities that all cooperate and have relatively similar resource endowments, and yet achieve very different levels of extraction