Collaborative Research: An Experimental Economics Investigation of Groundwater Resource Dynamics

世界各地的粮食生产越来越依赖地下水资源来提供清洁饮用水和灌溉的重要来源。地下水开采对复杂水文地质系统的动态产生影响，可能会降低未来人类和生态系统可用水的质量和数量。拟议的研究试图通过结合使用实验经济技术和水文地质模型，在地下水资源的背景下审查人类与自然系统之间的反馈。这项研究增进了对人类决策以及政策和心理背景在具有现实水文地质特征的动态公共地下水资源中的作用的理解。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都能够开发出更好地整合地下水动力学和人类行为的模型，以前人们认为这些行为是由各自领域的模型外生决定的。这项工作有助于让公众和政策制定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，整合了受现实世界地下水管理情况驱动的模型。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风险的情况，例如在加利福尼亚州的中央山谷；过度抽水可能导致整个资源受到污染的情况，例如孟加拉国部分地区的砷中毒情况；以及抽水导致海水入侵的情况，这对用户的影响因地点不同而有所不同，例如在美国沿海地区。在这些水文地质环境下，人类决策者面临着与地下水开采相关的不同外部成本，并有可能造成资源的灾难性故障。这些实验还有助于更好地理解投票、监管处罚和沟通等制度在复杂的共同财产资源中的作用。

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.