摘要：Policy design is largely informed by the traditional economic viewpoint that humans behaverationally in the pursuit of their own economic welfare, with little consideration of other regarding behavioror reciprocal altruism. New paradigms of economic behavior theory are emerging that build an empiricalbasis for understanding how humans respond to specific contexts. Our interest is in the role of humanrelationships in managing natural resources (forage and livestock) in semiarid systems, where spatial andtemporal variability and uncertainty in resource availability are fundamental system drivers. In this paperwe present the results of an economic experiment designed to explore how reciprocity interacts withvariability and uncertainty. This behavior underpins the Australian tradable grazing rights, or agistment,market, which facilitates livestock mobility as a human response to a situation where rainfall is so variablein time and space that it is difficult to maintain an economically viable livestock herd on a single managementunit. Contrary to expectations, we found that variability and uncertainty significantly increased transfersand gains from trade within our experiment. When participants faced variability and uncertainty, trust andreciprocity took time to build. When variability and uncertainty were part of the experiment trust wasevident from the onset. Given resource variability and uncertainty are key drivers in semiarid systems, newparadigms for understanding how variability shapes behavior have special importance
