Nicola Cerutti

• How do changes in the resources influence the individual behavior? This dissertation aims at answering this question by using laboratory experiments to investigate the behavior of actors that face considerable changes in the environment they are acting in. Resource changes and resource stock levels in common-pool resources have received relatively little attention by academic research so far, even though, in the modern world, the distribution of resources is in constant change, be it drastic or gradual. We are continuously observing changes in the resource balance across the world, with the menace of even greater changes in the future, both global (e.g. climate change) and local (e.g. natural disasters). Given these premises, knowing which conduct to expect from the resource users across the world in those cases is certainly useful in order to be able to ensure that future policies will be able to reduce the possible non-cooperative, and unsustainable behavior that could arise in such situations. This research tackles these aspects of cooperation in the management of common resources by conducting three laboratory experiments, using two different experimental tools. We tried to recreate in a controlled situation the challenges that changes in ecosystems pose to people in sensitive areas and examine how they react to gradual changes or sudden shocks, and how trust between actors and tendency to adopt cooperative strategies may vary. The first objective of this work is, as already mentioned, to investigate which reactions can be expected from resource users that face different types of resource changes, to pinpoint which of these changes can be critical hindrances for sustainable management. The second objective is to improve experimental research on this topic, by introducing in the experimental environment several ecological aspects, i.e. regeneration patterns, spatial distribution, and time continuous interactions, which have not been extensively studied as of yet.