Juan-Camilo Cardenas

After finishing my B.S. in Industrial Engineering in 1989, I worked for two years on social policy research, and decided to pursue my Master's in Resource Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship, completing the degree in 1994. I returned to my home country for the 1994-1996 period to join Javeriana University for teaching and research, and by 1996 I decided to continue with my Ph.D. degree in Resource Economics again at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and thanks to scholarships at different moments by the Inter-American Foundation, Resources for the Future and the World Wide Fund for Nature. Sam Bowles, Cleve Willis, Tom Stevens and John Stranlund guided my dissertation, titled "Rural Institutions, Poverty and Cooperation: Learning from Experiments and Conjoint Analysis in the Field". During my last doctoral year I had the chance to attend the Arizona Economic Science Laboratory summer program with Vernon Smith. After completion of my Ph.D., I continued with my post-doctoral studies at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, for one year, working with Elinor Ostrom. By the fall of 2000 I returned back to my home country, Colombia, and to Javeriana University where I have been since then, at the School of Environmental and Rural Studies, sharing research and teaching with a group of colleagues from various social and natural sciences.

My academic and research life can be described as a constant travel between the classroom, the laboratory, the field and back. I am currently using experimental methods inspired by game theory, psychology and economics, to study the problems of decision-making by individuals when facing environmental problems or collective ones in general, and how these decisions may lead to social outcomes that affect ecosystems and the well-being of these individuals. I have been conducting these economic experiments not only with students, but mostly in the field, where the subjects are people who face in their daily life the types of problems modeled and studied. Of particular interest to me are questions of how heterogeneity and inequality within and across groups may affect the decision making and the outcomes at social and ecological levels. Also I have been very interested in studying how do people react and adapt to different types of external and endogenous regulations aimed at eliminating the so called "tragedy of the commons."

Published Research

Cardenas, J C, Stranlund, J and Willis, C. 2002. Economic inequality and burden-sharing in the provision of local environmental quality. Ecological Economics: in press. [PDF] 270 KB

Cardenas, J C. 2002. Real wealth and experimental cooperation: experiments in the field lab. Journal of Development Economics: in press. [PDF] 395 KB

Cardenas, J C, Stranlund, J and Willis, C. 2000. Local environmental control and institutional crowding-out. World Development: published online. [PDF] 1 MB

The papers posted above are not SFI working papers, nor were they funded by SFI. They are solely the work of the author and coauthors, and do not necessarily reflect the research currently being undertaken on the SFI campus.