Elinor Ostrom and Neuroeconomics

As far as I know Elinor Ostrom has never run a neuroeconomics experiment but her research is likely to be of interest to neuroeconomists.  Her research on how groups govern the commons is multidisciplinary including extensive field research, economics experiments (with James Walker), and game theory (with Roy Gardner).  In outlining the design principles (slide 22) of successful institutions for governing commons, Professor Ostrom includes the ability of members to monitor other users and resources.  This is interesting because Ostrom shows this is important for harvesting social rewards, but monitoring the environment is also important for the harvesting of private rewards (See Read Montague and Brooks King-Casas in TICS, 2007, here.).  There is now doubt that social monitoring is important to know who to punish (and reward), and that people are keenly aware of the potential for being monitored, but this neural network is likely to be far more interesting in that it allows us handle small social defections before they become big ones, and it is this feature that allows a group to maintain their common agreement and behavior.

Comments

[cushion]

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[Alex Cruz]

The research work done by Elinor Ostrom is very impressive and will have lots of applications in the future.

[Skip Sanzeri]

Hi Kevin,

I tend to agree with your thoughts.

I spent most of my time deep into social media and the types of self monitoring systems you discuss seem to be at work here as well. You can watch blogs, chat rooms for owners and news sites... even YouTube videos, and see how users somewhat police themselves and their behaviors. In other words, if there is a rogue user putting up content that makes no sense or is disruptive, the other users seem to respond in one way or another.

The only problem with social media on the web in reference to what you're discussing here, is that in some cases there is anonymity which allows anybody to say anything. And, even if the user is rejected on a given blog or chat room, they can always come back and sign in under a different e-mail address and name.

I am concerned that we are in a little bit of the wild wild West here. So it will be interesting to see how things play out in social media as we move forward. It seems like these days we have two completely different social ecosystems. Of course we have the one that has been around forever which is human contact: whether the face-to-face, phone calls or other. But now with the advent of electronic communication, now we have an entire social ecosystem, which acts and behaves much differently than the human one.

Some numbers show that there are 400 million users on Facebook, spending an average of five hours per day. I really don't believe that people spend five hours per day on Facebook in general, I just think they leave their browsers open in the background and check back in. However, this is still a significant use of time in the social area, and many of the behaviors you are talking about are surfacing in this new, immense use of time.

I think we're just at the beginning of this whole thing, and who knows how this will all end up.

[Alex Cruz]

In particular, Ostrom's work emphasizes how humans interact with ecosystems to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields. Common pool resources include many forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems. She conducted her field studies on the management of pasture by locals in Africa and irrigation systems management in villages of western Nepal. Ostrom's work has considered how societies have developed diverse institutional arrangements for managing natural resources and avoiding ecosystem collapse in many cases, even though some arrangements have failed to prevent resource exhaustion. Her current work emphasizes the multifaceted nature of human–ecosystem interaction and argues against any singular "panacea" for individual social-ecological system problems.