In the traditional rural society, common pool resources (CPRs) have played an important role on economic activities and living conditions of rural residents and sustainable development of regional society. But political philosophers and economists have understood that if citizens respond only to private incentives, public goods would be under-provided and public resources over-utilized. It was called the tragedy of the commons.
To escape from the tragedy of the commons, and enhance the efficient utilization of CPRs, inquiries of the traditional cooperative system and investigations of its institutional and mechanism design are important. Its research also improves understandings of the governance relationship between residents, local governments and the central government.
Major findings and policy recommendations could be summarized as follows; the common utilization of the CPRs has played an important role on economies of scale of production and risk sharing between residents. Obstacles of effective utilization of the CPRs, however, might be (1) less investment on the CPRs owing to aging of residents and lack of funds, (2) evaporativity of the CPRs by switching to other purposes, and (3) the need for reorganization of traditional institutions and mechanism of the CPRs because of heterogeneity of members utilizing the CPRs.
Policy recommendations in the short run could be (1) subsidies for investment and regulations to reduce over utilization of the CPRs, (2) imposing environment evaluations in switching of CPRs to other purpose, (3) design on the optimal rent rate of public owned resources, and (4) differentiating policy measures for mutual assistance clubs of agricultural water utilities depending on the performance and pattern.
The long term policy recommendation could be focused on (1) enhancing the long term investment with extending rent period, (2) organizing local cooperative governance systems and (3) enhancing self reliance and cooperation by differentiated subsidies measures.
In theoretical methodology, we investigated conditions of the evolutionary stability and the repeated-reciprocality. Especially, in the coordinate game, we examined conditions and environments to induce Pareto superior solutions.

Researchers: Kyung-Duk Kim, Nae-Won Oh, Chang-Ho Kim
Research Period: 2013. 1～2013. 12
E-mail address: kdkim@krei.re.kr