Metagov Demoor
Speaker 1: So today, I'm very pleased to, to introduce Tina D'Amour and, Amina Gorbani, who are going to be talking about long term dynamics of institutions for collective action. Tina and Amina, are you ready to get started? Thank you so much.
Top Keywords
- commons 0.011
- rules 0.010
- institutions collective 0.009
- institutions 0.008
- change 0.007
- tina 0.007
- population growth 0.007
- amina 0.006
- collective action 0.006
- netherlands 0.006
- well 0.005
- sanctions 0.005
Transcript
So today, I'm very pleased to, to introduce Tina D'Amour and, Amina Gorbani, who are going to be talking about long term dynamics of institutions for collective action. Tina and Amina, are you ready to get started? Thank you so much.
Absolutely. Great. Go ahead.
My
pleasure. Okay. I'll start with sharing my screen and the PowerPoint we've prepared. Okay. Well, thank you for having asked me and Amina to tell you a bit more about a project we've been running for a few years now. It's actually going back quite a long time even to the ancient years of my PhD project, but, you know, data collection takes time sometimes. So we're going to talk about the long term development dynamics of institutions for collective action and how agent based modeling can be used to, well, basically, give a better understanding of historical developments. For me, that part is also sometimes complicated. I guess most of the audience will understand that part better than I do. That's why I've kindly asked Amina to join me because she's the brain behind that part. I'm the historian in the group here and but I'm not the only one. I myself chair a team at Rotterdam School of Management. We've moved there recently since September as part of a chair on social enterprise institutions for collective action. And we're with a whole group of people looking at various forms of institutions for collective action both in the past and today. So going from historical agriculture commons, gilts, water boards to cooperatives in the the nineteenth and twentieth century, mutuals until the energy and care compressive that are emerging today all over Europe and elsewhere in the world. So we have a broad look, not sector bound, on the development of institutions for collective action over time. And we focus on finding out what makes them resilient, and we do so on the basis of a multidisciplinary background with mixed methods usually. And Amina is herself working at Delft University, but is closely linked also to our team and working together with us a lot. It's part of a project which I I'll show you a bit more about later on. Now to give you the the the I'm I'm going to start with the basics of what is this all about and what what we actually really are studying and then move on to the methods and the results of that. That will be Amina's task. So we're looking at institutions for collective action. What are these? Okay. Maybe you have once read probably most of you must have seen it and read it, the seminal work by Alner Ostrom, gov in the comments with as a subtitle, the evolution of institutions for collective action. We're looking at that type of institution whereby a collectivity of members decides to set up well, organize in a way that they also have access to create and use the collectivity of resources. It can be anything from agriculture resources to energy to a car or multiple cars, many different types of resources. Now when you put a group of people together with a a collection of resources, you're bound to get some problems which we can frame as social dilemmas. And in order to solve the social dilemmas, we can come up with institutional arrangements, rules, norms, values, rules we decide on together. And this is actually, the the the the model you see here, a sort of conceptual model we work with. We call it the cicada model, so the strategies for institutions for collective action and development model, whereby we try to understand what brings these institutions in such a balance, what brings their members resources and rules and balance so that they achieve a resilient situation over time. I'm not going to say too much about that, but it's the basis of what how we study these, institutions. Now I'm going to take you quite a bit back in time to early modern history, where we already found a lot of these institutions for collective action of various types. And to start with, for example, the, the commons in early modern, The Netherlands. I see the typing is Dutch. I'm sorry for that, the types. The guilds of craftsmen, but also groups of women who set up institutions for safety in the cities. That's on your left hand side and the early modern versions. But, of course, you also have labor unions, cooperatives, water boards, mutuals later on. We're gonna focus on the top left hand side and the agricultural commons of early modern Europe because that's what we've really studied very intensively. And we've been looking in particular very intensively at the rules of those institutions for collective action. Rules that could be found in very, very thick books in the historical archives across Europe. We focus on several countries, in particular, The Netherlands, Spain, and The UK, specific areas within those countries. And in many archives across Europe, you still find these very thick books which hold all these rules and describe very clearly what you can and what you can't do on historical accounts. And as you can see, if you look at the the this particular example, which is in the Eastern part of The Netherlands, it's an example of a of a common that really survived for many, many years, hundreds of years. So we we find it really interesting to look at these particular commons because they show that a resilient institution building it, coming up with the right rules for that is actually possible. We have many examples of those. Now what we've done is composed a very large database
with the
detail with details of regulation on on various over 30 cases across Europe, all pasture commons, and they lived for at least 200 each per case between thirteen hundred and nineteen hundred. So most of them were have disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century. Some survived. And we've been analyzing the English together with that nice group of people in the bottom somewhere in Sweden in sunnier times, people from the nearest university in Sweden and Delft amongst others. I mean now we've analyzed this kind of example of what we call an individual rule, a rule whereby it's it's basically about mutual respect on the commons, about not treating each other in a dishonest way. And we analyze those according to a specific, yeah, codebook we've devised for this project. And over time, we try to understand how these rules change for specific resources. I'm not going to say too much about it, but just to show you what the bay sorry. The basis of this work is, we've actually been transcribing, so literally, defiguring the, ancient handwriting in these code in these thick books, rule books, basically, transcribing them and also translating them in English and then analyzing them according to our with our specific codebook. Now I see Amini is walking around, but I hope she can also take over in a moment. So we've already in the meanwhile, we've published a number of papers. Already, there's some papers in the process of being published. And what Amina is going to talk about is a paper we just submitted to the journal, which uses ABM to analyze these data, and and she will tell you all about it, what we've actually been doing. And, Irina, the floor is yours, and you tell me when I have to change the slides.
Yes. Thank you, Tina. Do you hear me? Yeah? Or yeah. My phone is fine. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I just changed my place to minimize background noise. Yeah. So just a small correction. Hello, everyone. Yes. I'm I saw on Tina's slide that I was stated as a postdoc, but I've actually been an assistant professor since 02/2016. So it shows how long we've been together, actually working together on this. So that's a good sign. Yeah. So yeah. What we've been trying to do with this huge dataset is to look at it from a different perspective to see how we can actually use simulations to understand the underlying mechanisms of the global patterns that we see in terms of institutional change in this, yeah, old dataset. And the whole idea was that, okay, if we try to simulate the patterns or try to actually represent them in a simulation, are we able to explain what individual behaviors are actually resulting in these global patterns? Well, that's just the general idea. And what we did was that we used an empirically validated model. So it was an existing model of CPR management, a a bunch of people taking from a resource, very abstract. And we wanted to see if we can, see the the patterns that we see from this historical dataset in this already existing model? And if yes, can we just trace back to see what kind of individual behavior resulted in these patterns? Can you go to the next slide, please, Tina? So to to be to be a bit more concrete, what this diagram shows you is a statistical analysis of the Tina's dataset, the historical dataset, and it's the patterns of institutional change. And what you see is that in The Netherlands and eave also in The United Kingdom, you see a u shape for institutional change, which means that at the beginning of the lifetime lifetime of a commons, there are lots of institutional changes. So we see rapid change at the beginning. So just to look at time zero, the access shows a time, standardized, of course. And then at some point, it stabilizes. So the chain the institutions change less. So there's rules and regulations basically change less, in the lifetime of the commons and towards the end of the lifetime. So when the commons is just about to die, very I'm just talking very simply. You you see another search of institutional change. Change. So the appropriators, the the communist try to change the institutions in order to survive, but they're not successful and that common size. That's just, like, the story that we see from, the historical dataset, and we want to see if you could actually see the same thing. I see questions popping up, but maybe I can respond to them after I finish my talk. Yeah. So we want to see if you could actually see this in the simulation, these u shapes. Can you go to the next slide maybe? So the hypothesis is that the u shaped pattern of institutional change in the nineteenth century is the result of an institutional learning phase. So at the start, the agents just try to learn by trial and error. So they kept changing the institutions. Then there was a period of stability, where the commoners were satisfied within current institutional setting. And then, there was a final period of rapid change, And, the hypothesis that Tina has proposed is that it was actually the result of social shock. So, for example, increased external pressure of companies. So, for example, they had to pay taxes all of a sudden at some point, and they couldn't bear this shock of taxation. And therefore, the come the commons died. Another hypothesis would be that the reason that they these commons died was not really because of the taxation incident, but it was actually an environmental shock. So for example, with drought or floods, etcetera, also result in this u shape. So a a rapid change at the end of the commons lifetime or not. So this is what we oh, keep wanting to change the slides myself. Can you change it again? Yeah. Yeah. So that was one. Then the next one, just keep this in mind for a minute. So the another one was about the lifetime of the Dutch comments. They were actually longer than The UK ones. And a hypothesis is that it's probably one reason for that could be because we there was less, focus on sanctioning in the Dutch comments as compared to the, English ones. So we want to see whether sanctioning, actually plays, a role in the longevity of their comments or not I'm just comparing these two countries. And another one. Can you go to the next is this the next one? Yeah. Another pattern is that institute incremental institution institutional change is actually influenced by how involved the commoners are with the common. So how they actually how often they meet each other, the frequency of meetings put in a very simple way, influences the lifetime of the common. And so the hypothesis that you wanted to test with the model was having frequent meetings among comments has a positive effect on the longevity of the comments. Next one. So this is what you see from the simulation. If you remember the u shape at the start of, my talk, this that that came from the dataset, and this comes from the simulated data. And the whole idea was that you were actually trying, to mimic the pattern. So we made the model so we we we configured the model the model in such a way that we we see the u shape, and then we wanted to trace back and see, okay, what was the underlying reason for this u shape to emerge from our model? This is a completely emergent behavior. It's a yeah. There's no time to talk about the model. And what was the interesting part was that when you had taxation, the the commons died, so they couldn't survive anymore. The the the agents in the simulation couldn't cope with the with paying taxes every tick, every time step, but the environmental shock was actually not a factor. So if you had an environmental shock where all of a sudden, there was one quarter of the resource left, say that there's, like, a fishing pond, and then there's only 25% of the fish left in the pond, the agents the people can actually recover from the shock. But when you have this social taxation where they lose a constant amount of money per time step, it's just it's too difficult for them to bear and to change the institutions to come up to a stable situation again. So you see that the u shape so it's kind of a confirmation that taxes indeed are very bad for the survival of the commons or at least were. So we just you know, that that was one reason why this happened in the past, the the conversation.
Assumes there's a threshold of tax rate that makes a difference.
So we also played with the tax as as well, the the thresholds. But but yeah. Yeah. That's the details. So if you yeah. So this was the environmental one. Let's just pass it on because I already discussed. So that in in the environment, they can stabilize again. So there's a shock. So the resource is lost, but the the agents recover from the shock, basically. That can you go to the next one, please? Yeah. And this one is about sanctioning. So there is a positive correlation between the number of institutions without sanction in one run and the age of the commons. So the the bottom line the the the x axis shows the the age of the commons. And what you see is that those institutes so if you have institutions with sanctions, the the life of the commons is actually shorter, which confirms the reason that sanctionings were probably one reason why the Dutch commons were longer living than the English ones, The UK ones. And the next one, this one is about the frequency of meetings. And what we again see is that, the frequency of meetings. So the more the the the agents are involved in the comments, so the more they are involved in defining the institutions, the higher the chance that the the commons lives longer. I'm just showing you some results because it's just, you know, a huge project and with lots of parameters, etcetera, just to give you an idea of what went on. So, Tina, do you want to go back? Do you want to reflect on this?
Yeah. So yeah. I'm just going to give you a bit of a summer summary here. There's more than just this that we've analyzed on the base of those data, but this is more or less the ABM analysis. One of the really interesting things I think that comes out of the database and and several types of analysis we've been doing in the past is is the well, I do sort of the reevaluation of sanctioning as an instrument to prevent people from free riding. And various of the analysis and the other studies we've done, we've come to the conclusion that sanctioning is definitely not a sort of guarantee for longevity of an institution. As as Amina also hinted at, we see and so a a negative correlation between longevity and the degree to which these commoners were coming up with sanctions. It doesn't mean we we didn't count because we don't have those data how many times sanctions were actually applied, but we look at how important they were in the regulation as a whole of these commoners. So, basically, there's a lot of rules on the common, which are simply rules without sanctions. So you apply them and you tell people you can't put more than five sheep on the common, but you don't tell them what happens if they do. And still it works. So that's one of the intriguing solutions, I guess. We also well, this is also again confirmed by Ma'am Amina's analysis is that it instead of sanctioning, you better talk. You have meetings about how you can actually solve problems. And probably a part of the explanation here is that talking about problems and adequate solutions as in a within a connectivity is a way to internalize the decisions and into people's behavior. So once they're present in a meeting and they come to every meeting, they're often forced in this case, they were often forced to go to meetings or they would get fined. That that's something they find. If you went to a meeting, then you were actually aware of why the solution was why why your rule had to be changed. And it's easier to follow it up than, you know, hearing it from somebody who was at a meeting and you weren't. Another element which we haven't discussed, but which was quite clear from our analysis is that contrary to the Nastrum's list of design principles where she stressed also the importance of graduated sanctions, the three strikes and you're out system of of of sanctioning. It's something we don't really find in our database. So, apparently, it was either less used in historical Europe and the cases we have. Either we the the cases we looked at didn't really need it because they had other instruments to to apply. I mean, we have some speculation about what this also means for the Nuestreams database, but we can talk about that later on as well. So, yeah, finally, so the the this whole is part of a larger project, called the Midi project, which is, well, officially already ended, but because of corona, we got an extension which allows us also to organize a nice workshop at the end of this year to which we want to attract a a a fine group of people who want to think along with us on along two lines. On the one hand, we would like to attract people, possibly historians or others. We also have similar databases with, which show the long term development of regulation, within institutions for collective action. We know our database is quite exceptional, but I'm sure there's other people who have similar data. And on the other hand, we'd like to attract people, and I think this crowd probably has more of those, who can come up with innovative methods to, analyze the dynamics of such long enduring institutions for collective action. So we'll we'll be sending out a COVID paper before the summer, and we hope to put together a nice team of people just after the summer. And, hopefully, hopefully, who knows, to meet each other in person, in December. So wild guess, but we'll try. This is it for now. I'll stop sharing maybe.
Okay. Well, I'm gonna I can moderate for the rest of the panel. First of all, thank you. This is a fascinating and really on point for what this group is talking about. I think the first question was from Seth about the early women's protection groups.
Yeah. I just there it looked like it was what what were those called? So I can look that up later.
Sorry. Did you On your
sorry, Tina. Thank you so much. This is I'm really glad to be able to merge these communities. Your very first slide gave lots of examples of the kinds of common institutions you look at in historical Netherlands and thereabouts. Could you share the name of the women's protection groups that you described?
What what you're saying? The protection groups? I didn't get it. What Yeah.
The name? Yeah. You said on your first slide, you alluded to different kinds of commons, guilds and pastor commons, and then you said something about women's groups.
Ah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Good. Oh, that's one of my pet projects, actually, so very nice of you to ask for it. Actually, and it's a good tourist trip as well if you ever get over to these corners of the world. And in the North North Western Part of Europe, you have a development of groups of women who decide to basically not marry and live a sort of semi religious life in groups and also often in separate parts of cities. So they build cities within cities for women only. They use the religious well, being sort of religious as a as a bit of an excuse to do so, and they get this special arrangement with the pope that they're actually left by themselves. But what is really intriguing is that they managed to organize also their what is called the Beganage, the Beguines are the the women, they call them, as a sort of independent community. And the collective resource is basically their safety and also to some extent their income and their work. And they also have similar rules as, for example, the gilts, and we also try to analyze those. That's,
Wow. Look looking forward to seeing, that that fully developed once you get a manuscript. In the meantime, could you spell it?
Yeah. I'll put it in the in the chat. Yeah.
Thank you.
Was it in The Netherlands only, Tina?
No. It's actually if you would put it, it's a bit of an area from Northern France to halfway The Netherlands, not all the way to the to the north and Belgium. So that's the area where you find it. And it's actually relate I've been doing quite a bit of work on demographic developments and marriage patterns, and this is also related to the fact that a lot this is an area where women where a very large proportion of the population varied very late also to women. So a lot of them stayed single and did their own work, and that's why they actually also, you know, heard it together in the cities. Never expected this question in this audience, to be honest, but nice to talk about it.
And then next, I think Zargam had a number of questions. I don't know sort of. It was some of them were earlier in the presentation. So so do you want
I I peppered them through. They were responses to the specific content, so I I actually have to go look at them and reproduce the the context. So if you wanna jump to somebody else, I'll I'll reread them and make sure I can provide pointers to what they said that triggered them.
Okay. Sounds good. I think next is, Daniel.
Thanks for the presentation. The part you mentioned at the end about the attending, the meetings, and about how instead of, like, imagining some sanction scheme or sanction scheme or a punishment scheme, just including people could lead to changes in outcome. How do we move that into an online and a modern setting where we can't have, you know, on the East Coast, people would talk about the town hall meetings and you have other cultures have their own understanding of that sort of small group belonging. So how do we make that occur in an online setting?
Very good question. One one which has also crossed my mind over the past few months, and I think it is to some extent already happening or being tried out, for example, in the the format of the, the platform cooperatives. Now it also comes down to the very interest intriguing question, I think, of the role of technology, in this case, especially communication technology and its impact on cooperation within these institutions. And, I think whether you so we came up with a conclusion that meeting really helps to make people internalize the rules and, you know, force them to cooperate and prevent them from from free riding. But I do think that it and well, it's a it's a hypothesis. It's not it's not something we know for sure, but we're going to study in a project that just is about to start. I do think that it's also linked to the type of resource you're looking at. But if you'd be looking at energy cooperatives as a similar format of an institution for collective action, whereby the energy production or or the infrastructure is the collective good you have, then there's actually other types of technology that can prevent people from free riding. For example I mean, what you you pay your your your your you pay your your bill as a consumer and that's and, you know, and you get more energy and you pay it again. And if you don't pay, you're you're locked up. Right? Because of the the the high-tech side to it, I think well, high-tech, I mean, it's it's it's in itself not high-tech, but because of the technological facilities, you can actually, reduce the the amount of meetings you need to internalize rule because you there's a a technological way to enforce them. Now we also look at other types of institutions for collective action, for example, mutual insurances. And there, it's totally different. We there is new forms of mutual insurance currently being developed all over the world. In The Netherlands, it's a quite rapid development whereby people set up their own funds to pay for well, being, you know, in case you're you get sick and you can't do your job as a self employed anymore. Now what is really interesting there is that these new modern groups of mutuals decided from the beginning as a collectivity of collectivities, basically, they decided to set a rule being that they wouldn't want they didn't want to grow beyond 50 members. And the 50 members limit has all everything to do with the fact that they, do not want to lose control over, over each other's, well, behavior. They want to enhance trust through social control. If your group becomes too large and you don't have a technological mean to prevent people from free riding, then you have to do something else, and then you introduce rules such as a limit to group size. So and I think it's really related to to some extent to the the type of good you're sharing, whether you can rely on group meetings to internalize or you you really need them, the social control that comes with it. Or there's other means like technology to save you from free riding. I hope that's a bit of an answer.
That that sort of raises a question that I had more generally because, you know, you had mentioned that taxation and environmental change could could sort of trigger the decline of these commons. What about population growth and different rates of population growth? I I would think that would have an effect, but you didn't mention it.
Yeah. Well, this type of institution is exclusive. Yeah. So contrary to what a lot of people seem to suggest, and it started with Garrett Hart and trying to do that in his tragedy of the commons, These these are not open access resources. Their the the access to these resources is limited by rules, sometimes also physically limited by by fences, for example. So this type of institution, you know, if the Elna Rostrum's list is is very useful also for for this question. Her first point is, and you have to decide basically in who's in and who's out. She didn't formulate it like that, but that's what it comes down to. So basically, you set rules about who can appropriate the resource. Yeah? And what we see in the historical commons, but you see it in other types of commons elsewhere in the world as well, is that people decide who is in and who is out. So it's not as if everybody had access to the commons. This also means that you have an instrument to regulate the effects of population growth. Yeah. So we do see sometimes an effect of population growth leading to a higher number of people who are entitled to use the common. It depends a bit on what kind of rules they have. Sometimes, For example, many of the commons had this, you know, you you had to for example, you had to own a number of cattle to use the common or in some cases, you have to belong to specific families and it's sort of generation thing, generation after generation. So you in one way or another, population growth will trickle down to the demand on the common. But then, of course, you can change the rules. That's what you often see happening. They tighten the rules. They all of we can do actually two things. You can change the appropriation rules and you can change the access rules. If you change the access rules, you can say, you know, there's there's fewer people allowed on the common. And for example, if if there's a generation thing involved, you say, okay. Only two members of the family in, you know, can can transfer the right. Something we also see, for example, in a lot of cases in the sixteenth century, there's a bit of an economic crisis here and there, and all of a sudden women can't claim the right on the common anymore in some areas. So that's also a way to limit access. Right? You can also, of course, change the appropriation rules and say, okay. The Number of people in our group are growing, so we have to redistribute the resources. And instead of each having 10 cows on the common, we reduce it to, for example, eight. Yeah. So you can actually I can't pull everything in the in the chat chat that I will do. So there's two ways to do that. I think the most commonly used is that, first, restrict access and then sometimes we distribute resources.
Okay. And and have you ever seen an instance where the rules themselves might have had an effect on population growth or not?
No. I wouldn't say that. Not really. The thing is also I mean, population growth in the European historical cases that we have included in this and which I know best. Real populate well yeah. No. Actually, the it's a good question in another way. What you do see is that these institutions, once there's a sort of overall population growth, are introduced as a solution. Yeah? The the the the the first question, I answered mainly by by referring to the internal regulation you can change. But if you have population growth, you sometimes see this type of institution emerging in order to regulate overall access to resources. That's what you see, for example, in the early modern well, in the late medieval period. So the period, let's say, around December, 1300 is a period when you have a lot of population growth, commercialization, urbanization in Europe. Yeah? Population grows, more demand for agriculture produce, so more pressure on natural resources. And at that point, people start looking for ways to make natural resource use more efficient. And setting up a common is actually a way to make it more efficient because you then subdivide it in another way instead of just allowing access to the commons in a a direct way and access to the resources in a direct way without regulating it. So, yes, the answer is you do see an effect, but then it's an effect that leads to the setting up of new institutions rather than I I don't think I can give examples of changes in the rules that actually would lead to population growth. That's different.
And I think Zargan is ready now to Yeah. To find him.
Sorry for the the the delay there. But yeah. So I was originally you were top pointing out the u shape and talking about the data and your models in the context of sort of introducing the taxes. And I wanted to ask the first two questions together. One of them was about framing the change with the taxes as making the coordination problem somehow infeasible such that the community sort of thrashes in an effort to try to solve it, but ultimately kind of fails? And then the first question was related to cyclicality. Are there I saw some smaller bumps in the data and thought maybe if we think of those external perturbations as changes to the coordination problem, then some of the bumps could be thought of as succeeding in reorganizing to meet those changes. Whether this kind of more cyclic interpretation of the institution's response to stimulus is resonant with you or is that red herring?
Oh, yeah. Amina, you want to answer?
Yeah. If you if you could, you wanna give some general remarks. I can't go into the detail.
Yeah. Well, yes. In a way, it it is. I mean, I'm not sure if I get your question entirely correct. But one of the things that you do see, we have some data about it, is that there is some trial and error in formulating rules, which I mean that they sometimes go through a process of changing the rules because they see the resource depleting. These commons had on the one hand pasture land, which if you govern it well, it comes back. You know, you can have pasture good pasture land every year, but they also had depletable resources like peat. Yeah? So, subsoil resources, which well, if once you harvest it and you burn it, you know, it's gone. So you have to be more careful with that. And there, it's interesting that we do have a number of cases where you see that, that once they see their their total stock of peat is depleting and the people are keep using it at the same tempo, you know, they don't change their behavior, that they try to adjust the rules. And it happens in different ways. Sometimes they they put a higher fine on, taking too much, but it doesn't. So the question is how high does the fine have to be to really threaten people, you know, to keep them from free riding and taking too much. If they change the rule, you have to you have to reduce the amount you can get, but then they also, turn it into a higher fine. And you see sometimes that they really have to try this. Sometimes they they have a very high fine all of a sudden. But then the thing is also, what do people believe? That's really even in COVID context, it's interesting. You put a very high fine on on misbehavior, but people say, oh, that's ridiculous. Nobody will ever pay that, you know, they will never bring me to court for it because it's ridiculous what you're telling me that I'm gonna have to pay. So they just keep free writing. At that point, you have to rethink what what is the right level. You know? What is fine can simply be too high to be acceptable as well. Then you see sometimes that they vary the level of the fine until they find the right level that people seem to accept it and find it believable. You know, they they say, okay. They they will probably make me pay that ride on the spot, so I'm going you know, I'm not going to risk it. So it's it's this is the kind of thing I do see behind the modification of the rules. I'm not sure if it's entirely what you mean, but what I see.
It it's related actually, that kind of begs a clarifying question. And when you talk about changing rules, how do you make a strong distinction between structural changes of rules and parametrics? So there, the presence of a fine in my mind is structural. Structural. The level of the fine is parametric. So, you know, do we make a distinction between those two things in this research? I I realize you can't go into the full detail, but I'm actually really curious about structure versus parameters in rule setting.
Yeah. Me too.
It's not always easy to do because we don't always have that kind of data. Yeah?
But in the model, we do.
Yeah. And well, there you go. Yeah. You maybe can talk more about it. I mean, I've been talking all the time.
That's okay. So, yeah, about the so I see this question about the, the taxes being a coordination problem. So the model is actually very simple. And what the agents do during the meetings is to come together to vote on the amount of the resource that are they that they are allowed to take and the the the the condition under which they're allowed to take it. So, for example, one rule would be you are each person in the group is allowed to take five units of the resource every two time steps. As simple as that. And then there's a in addition to this, the fine. So how much fine also and and how much monitoring. So you also have this for the institution. So there are just four components for each rule, and it's through a voting mechanism. So the the more popular the rule is, yeah, the chance the higher the chance that it would be selected. And what happens during and there's a there's a threshold. So I think I mean, just I'm just giving you examples now. But I think the threshold is that if 50% of the population in the simulation are unhappy with the amount of resource that they have, then they would come together and try to change the boat. So that's the part where they actually get together, but then we also play around with the possibilities to meet. So we say that, like, all agents have the possibility to meet, for example, every six months, and they would only meet if the the threshold is met. So there's, like, a double condition. And that's the thing that we play with. So yeah. Inuit, on on the one hand, it's actually much much more simple than a coordination problem because we don't really have coordination as such. But on the other hand, it's all about this individualistic versus collectivism kind of thing. You know? They're constantly trying to survive, and then, like, they do decide on the collective, but at a very basic level of just, you know, using the most popular rule among themselves. Do you see my point? So it I Yeah.
Makes sense. So, actually, I'm gonna ask some clarifying questions. I do a lot of modeling of of social systems, so this is fun for me. So it sounds like we've got kind of on one level the question of the the the meeting itself. So that's sort of the you have rules about the conditions under which one could meet and then the states under which people decide to meet. Given that they meet, there are other conditions under which they actually make a change, but those changes are are are, parametric in the sense that I was just describing rather than structural. So we could think of these systems in their sort of, you know, as from their most extreme, maybe most abstract setting where you have, you know, some sort of resource allocation problem where even some of the structural components are, you know, up for inclusion or exclusion, like the existence of a sanction, which to be fair can be met parametrically by setting it to zero. So you can still kind of accomplish a design space by setting parameters to their whatever their non present value is. But then, ultimately, we actually kinda have an interesting multilayer problem where frequency of meeting affects how frequent things can change. You know, stimulus might affect whether people exercise the right to meet. Given that they meet, there's a question of their alignment and whether a change is actually made. And then we can sort of look at whether changes are being made, which add or remove structural mechanisms versus tuning the parameters within a structural mechanism, which was what Tina was just talking about. So I find that really interesting. This goes back to my first question, actually, about the temporal modes because seeing the little bumps, I intuit some, like, sense that there are minor and major perturbations and that the response to that stimulus in the community is met at least sometimes, that they get something happens and they respond to it and they address it adequately versus the death thrashing we see on the upside of the u. And for context, I'm a control theorist by education. That was what my PhD is in, so I like frequency domain.
Yeah. So we actually do get because we have lots of random values, it's a very abstract model. So none of the parameters actually make sense. So we've looked at full parameter ranges. We get situations where indeed just goes up and down. There's no stable institution for the whole period of the simulation. But for these for the the ones that we're reflecting on, they're actually the ones that you did reach a period of stability of institution. So one institution was selected among the agents, and then we wanted to see, okay, for those scenarios simulation runs where you have stable institutions emerging. So you actually have an institution where the agents agree on and don't constantly change it. What are the conditions? You know? And then, you know, what are the underlying mechanisms? So we only look at the stable ones for these results.
Interesting. Okay. When I think this sort of in a, you know, in historical setting, I think it's very important to realize that there's, on the one hand, the internal management of these commoners. They try to solve problems, but there simply are also huge challenges they have not under control. And for example, the introduction of taxes is quite vital in that. Introduction of taxes and all sorts of, well, I could call it teasing, but it was a bit more by the government, the national government in those times. They really tried in several ways. They came up with new legislation, new legislation to really abolish the commons and the guilt. Actually, basically, more or less every type of institutional collective action was around the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century was abolished or a bit later. This just did not fit the policy and the, you know, ideological thinking of that period. So but those challenges were enormous because, for example, in Belgium, there was a legislation around the middle of the nineteenth century which simply took over the rule of these cons and took their property anywhere and under force enclosed. So you then you don't, of course, have this this cyclical attempt to to change the rules and adapt because there's simply no more adapting to it. It's you know, you're abolished. So yeah.
You're assuming yeah. I mean, so the analysis is of something that is has a high degree of autonomy. And when that autonomy is taken away, it's just not the same thing, period.
Exactly. And they do try to adapt because you see you know, the u shape you saw in the beginning is I think it can be largely explained by the fact that they tried they actually are battling with new rules against these these upcoming threats, but they they really can't because it's it's, you know, it's bit bigger than them. And
So that's actually the essence of my question about infeasibility. So that taking of autonomy takes the problem that they were trying to solve makes it infeasible. And so I was highlighting that that spike in some way as a thrash against the infeasible problem and death at the point where they just sort of concede or or basically accept failure.
Yeah. You know, you actually also see it in in other things in our comparison with so we compare The Netherlands, UK, and Spain. And I'm I'm still at the in the quite fierce discussion with one of my historian colleagues in UK who's not obviously more knowledgeable than me about The UK situation. But, one of the the explanations I have for the difference in, the level of sanctioning they used, The Netherlands versus UK. So The Netherlands has very low degree of sanctions per rule. So they they have a lot of rules without sanctions. Apparently, they they solve it in another way. Whereas in The UK, you see that this is actually far more decays. They have far more rules with sanctions than they have in The Netherlands. Yeah? So one of my assumptions there is that the it it is it comes it's a result of the legal system. In The UK, you have in that period the manor court, which decides on most of the the rules. Whereas in the in The Netherlands, you had a very, very autonomous commons that really could decide on their own what kind of rules they wanted. And I think that autonomy is really vital to understand what common survive. As I say, not all historians agree with me, but I I think it's an interesting hypothesis.
Well, we're getting we have a couple more minutes. So I would open it up to sort of everybody who's on and see if there's anyone else who has any questions on the presentation.
I just wanna comment how awesome this is. It's pretty mind blowing.
Thanks. We do our best.
Just one since it doesn't sound like anybody does, just one thought and it it could be that you've already looked at this line of research, but there's I don't know if you're familiar with Robert Ellickson's Order Without Law. He's a legal scholar who wrote about property relations in Shasta County, California and how it people were unaware of the law and didn't care about the law and had no sense of the sanctions. And he he sort of what you said about how adding sanctions doesn't explicit sanctions doesn't help sort of gelled with his, ethnographic research there. And he has some really interesting, sort of explanations that he comes up with, such as that people actually prefer not to have a sanction because it places, the the violator in their debt. And then that becomes very useful to them later because they can decide, you know, how to how and when to apply that that that and sort of cash it in. But anyway, just a thought on something that maybe a similar some similar line of research. So
Yeah. We also see sometimes what we call liability rules within the commons. We don't see it a lot, but sometimes it's actually they also try to make people mutually responsible for