Unraveling the efficiency and equity effects of communication in collective compliance: The role of leaders among small-scale gold miners in Colombia

It has been widely demonstrated that collective action and self-governance are powerful means for communities to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’. The capacity of a community or a group of users to manage common-pool... [ view full abstract ]

It has been widely demonstrated that collective action and self-governance are powerful means for communities to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’. The capacity of a community or a group of users to manage common-pool resources depends on their ability to craft and enforce rules to cope with the dilemmas of cooperation (Ostrom 1990). Some settings such as small-scale gold mining in alluvial deposits face some of the challenges of common-pool resources such as non-excludability but the structure of the situation do not provide the incentives to develop and sustain cooperation strategies among participants. Even though the challenges that states face in the regulation of small-scale gold mining due to the huge costs of monitoring and enforcement, states can provide incentives that promote cooperation, reducing the burden of enforcement and changing social outcomes. We designed and implemented a field experiment with 200 gold miners in Colombia's Pacific region to explore an external intervention based on collective compliance. In our setup, the government sets the target for aggregate compliance, verifies the target and then, conditional on collective compliance, provides a reward to the group. This limits the state's burden to verifying aggregates, leaving the community members to decide among themselves whether to reach the aggregate target. In this setting, we varied the strictness of the aggregate compliance target and, as our focus, varied communication. Communication, i.e., allowing individuals in groups to talk before decisions, is well established as improving coordination for efficiency. Yet we are interested in details of equity that we believe are much less studied for collective action. We find that collective incentives appear to be promising as a mining intervention. We also confirm that communication enhances the probability of coordination sufficient to achieve collective success and we find that communication raises equity on average. However, in contrast to (implicit) expectations, it does not always raise equity − and inequity can be stable. Concerning when communication raises versus lowers equity, here we add a considerable novel focus on the dynamics of the communications that occur when groups are trying to coordinate. Our greatest focus is "leaders" who play central roles in leading groups towards the efficient or inefficient outcomes they achieve. Those leaders at the same time are establishing how the costs of group compliance will be distributed among group members.