Collaborative Research: An Experimental Economics Investigation of Groundwater Resource Dynamics

全世界越来越依赖地下水资源来提供重要的清洁饮用水和灌溉，以促进粮食生产。抽取地下水会影响复杂的水文地质系统的动态，可能会降低未来人类和生态系统可用水的质量和数量。拟议的研究旨在通过结合使用实验经济技术和水文地质建模，在地下水资源的背景下，检查人类和自然系统之间的反馈。该研究提高了对人类决策的理解，以及政策和心理背景在动态共同地下水资源中的作用，其特点是具有现实的水文地质特征。更好地了解物理反馈，信息和系统复杂性如何影响个人决策，使经济学家和水文地质学家能够开发出更好地整合地下水动态和人类行为的模型，这些模型以前被认为是在各自领域的模型中外部确定的。这项工作有助于使公众和决策者了解如何更好地调整管理政策，以提高地下水资源的效率和可持续性。这项研究超越了以前在这一领域的工作，通过整合模型，是由现实世界的地下水管理情况的动机。虽然这项研究是一般性的，但它对各种情况都有影响，包括含水层面临枯竭危险的情况，如在加州的中央谷;过度抽取含水层可能导致整个资源污染的情况，如孟加拉国部分地区砷中毒的情况;以及在抽水导致海水入侵的情况下，这会根据位置（例如在美国的沿海地区）对用户产生不同的影响。这些水文地质环境产生的情况下，人类决策者面临与地下水抽水相关的外部成本差异，也有可能发生灾难性的资源故障。这些实验也有助于更好地理解机构的作用，如投票，监管处罚和通信在一个复杂的共同财产资源。

Groundwater resources are increasingly relied upon to provide vital sources of clean drinking water and irrigation for food production throughout the world. Groundwater extraction impacts the dynamics of complex hydrogeologic systems in ways which may degrade the quality and quantity of water available for human and ecological systems in the future. The proposed research seeks to examine the feedback between human and natural systems in the context of groundwater resources through the combined use of experimental economic techniques and hydrogeologic modeling. The research improves understanding of human decision making and the role of policy and psychological context in a dynamic common groundwater resource that is characterized by realistic hydrogeologic features. A better understanding of how physical feedbacks, information, and system complexity affect individual decision-making allows both economists and hydrogeologists to develop models that better integrate groundwater dynamics and human behavior previously considered to be exogenously determined in models from the respective fields. The work helps to inform the public and policy makers on how to better tailor management policies to improve the efficiency and sustainability of groundwater resources. This research moves beyond previous work in this area by integrating models that are motivated by real-world groundwater management situations. While the research is general scope, it has implications for a variety of situations, including where aquifers are at risk of depletion, such as in California's Central Valley; situations where excessive pumping of an aquifer can lead to contamination of the entire resource, as in the case of arsenic poisoning in parts of Bangladesh; and in instances where pumping leads to sea water intrusion, which influences users differently depending on location, such as in coastal regions of the United States. These hydrogeologic settings produce situations in which human decision makers face differential external costs associated with groundwater pumping and also the potential for catastrophic failure of the resource. The experiments also contribute to a better understanding of the role of institutions such as voting, regulatory penalties and communication within a complex common-property resource.