The Virtual Commons

Welcome to the Virtual Commons! We develop real-time dynamic experiments to help us analyze and understand issues related to the governance of common resources. Sharing common resources has been a challenge for human societies for millennia. In many circumstances, the ability to create effective institutional arrangements has helped avoid the tragedy of the commons. Controlled experiments have been instrumental in increasing our understanding of how humans organize themselves in cooperative arrangements to govern common resources. On this website you will find software to perform a diverse set of group experiments.

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 0625354 and SES 0748632) ^* and Arizona State University and is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity.