Indirect Reciprocity, Resource Sharing, and Environmental Risk: Evidence from Field Experiments in Siberia

Design principles for risk-pooling systems

In times of crisis, risk pooling can enhance the resilience of individuals, households and communities. Risk-pooling systems are most effective when their participants adhere to several principles: (1) participants should agree that the pool is for needs that arise unpredictably, not for routine, predictable needs; (2) giving to those in need should not create an obligation for them to repay; (3) participants should not be expected to help others until they have taken care of their own needs; (4) participants should have a consensus about what constitutes need; (5) resources should be either naturally visible or made visible to reduce cheating; (6) individuals should be able to decide which partners to accept; and (7) the scale of the network should be large enough to cover the scale of risks. We discuss the cultural and evolutionary foundations of risk-pooling systems, their vulnerabilities and their relationship to commercial insurance.

Linking subsistence harvest diversity and productivity to adaptive capacity in an Alaskan food sharing network

BACKGROUND

Although anthropogenic climate change poses existential challenges for Indigenous communities in the Arctic, these challenges are not entirely unprecedented. Over many generations, Arctic peoples have developed a wide range of behavioral strategies to navigate environmental change and uncertainty, and these strategies provide a foundation for contemporary adaptation.

AIMS

In this article, we focus on mixed cash-subsistence economies and the social networks that underlie them in Alaska. The patterns of food production, labor exchange, and food sharing in subsistence-oriented communities throughout Alaska are driven by the productivity of keystone households who regularly harvest and share resources within and between communities.

MATERIALS & METHODS

Building on previous research suggesting the critical importance of these networks to community resilience, we use network analysis to investigate whether patterns in resource transfers between households are associated with subsistence harvest diversity-the diversity of species harvested by a household unit. We use exponential random graph models to describe the structure of a sharing network from Aniak, Alaska, and model the links between harvest productivity, harvest diversity, and household position in this network.

RESULTS

Our results indicate that both productivity and diversity are positively associated with network connections, and that productivity alone provides an incomplete model of network structure.

DISCUSSION

We suggest that subsistence harvest diversity may play a unique role in supporting adaptive capacity and resilience by maintaining the productivity of keystone households despite changing environments and sustaining social network structures that circulate resources throughout the community. Harvest diversity may also serve as a broad indicator of Indigenous ecological knowledge and a tangible representation of cultural practices, values, and worldviews that underlie subsistence in Alaska.

CONCLUSION

Greater attention to harvest diversity is important for understanding how subsistence networks adapt to environmental change and uncertainty linked to social and ecological dynamics of anthropogenic climate change.

The Lazarillo's game: Sharing resources with asymmetric conditions

The Lazarillo of Tormes' picaresque novel introduces a story where two subjects sequentially extract (one, two or three) tokens from a common pool in an asymmetric information framework (the first player cannot observe her partners' actions). By introducing a reward for both subjects in case that in every period at least one subject had taken one single token, we define an interesting coordination game. We conduct an experiment with 120 undergraduate students to study their behavior in this framework. We find that if the second player is allowed to take more tokens than her partner, then the frequency of cooperators does not seem to be affected by the informational asymmetry. Nevertheless, this asymmetry (i) incentives the second player to use her 'power of extraction' while the social externality is still available, (ii) yields to more asymmetric profit distributions when subjects win the social externality and (iii) delays the breach period in case of coordination failure. Furthermore, the first choice of the first player is determinant for getting the reward.