Fixed position and property rights in sequential resource dilemmas under uncertainty

Considered in this paper is a noncooperative n-person resource dilemma game in which players can share a common and uncertain resource whose probability distribution is common knowledge. Making their requests from the pool privately with no preplay communication, individuals are granted their requests if, and only if, the total group request does not exceed the value of the unknown resource. We investigate this game under the sequential protocol of play and show that if positions in the sequence are fixed for all stage games and commonly known, the threat of retaliation against players requesting disproportionally large shares is sufficient to induce a more egalitarian distribution of requests. Acquisition of property rights, which is hypothesized to induce more skewed request distributions, was ineffective, presumably because of the relatively large group size, or lack of outcome feedback.