The social dilemma called the anticommons dilemma represents a context in which a scarce resource has multiple owners who can exclude one another from harvesting from that resource. Not much...Show moreThe social dilemma called the anticommons dilemma represents a context in which a scarce resource has multiple owners who can exclude one another from harvesting from that resource. Not much attention has been paid to factors that lead to non-cooperative decisions in this context. Consequently, the present study investigates how the salience of collective consequences (externalities awareness) influences (non-)cooperative choice behavior in people differing in social value orientations (SVO). After SVO was measured and one of the two externalities awareness conditions was presented, the participants (N = 168) had to indicate a minimum price to give a co-owner access to the resource (WTA) in a modified anticommons paradigm. It was expected that when externalities were made salient individuals would display higher levels of cooperation, by indicating lower WTA’s, compared to when externalities were not made salient. Moreover, it was expected that when externalities were not made salient prosocials would display higher levels of cooperation than proselfs, whereas when externalities were made salient this difference would be smaller. Although the effect of externalities awareness and the interaction effect of this factor with SVO was non-significant, exploratory analyses indicated severe underuse of the common resource. The limitations of this study and suggestions for future research are discussed.Show less
