Combination of institutional incentives for cooperative governance of risky commons

Finding appropriate incentives to enforce collaborative efforts for governing the commons in risky situations is a long-lasting challenge. Previous works have demonstrated that both punishing free-riders and rewarding cooperators could be potential tools to reach this goal. Despite weak theoretical foundations, policy makers frequently impose a punishment-reward combination. Here, we consider the emergence of positive and negative incentives and analyze their simultaneous impact on sustaining risky commons. Importantly, we consider institutions with fixed and flexible incentives. We find that a local sanctioning scheme with pure reward is the optimal incentive strategy. It can drive the entire population toward a highly cooperative state in a broad range of parameters, independently of the type of institutions. We show that our finding is also valid for flexible incentives in the global sanctioning scheme, although the local arrangement works more effectively.