Abstract
Many of the world's common pool resources are located in poor countries, where consumption levels may be sufficiently low to have an adverse effect on the users' health. Under these circumstances, an agent's utility function may be described as an S-shaped function of consumption. Using non-cooperative game theory, very poor groups of users are shown to have a lower probability of cooperative management of common pool resources, than groups with adequate consumption levels. However, the chances for cooperation are greatest for users that are only moderately poor. If there is a variation in resource productivity for this group, cooperation may break down in periods of low productivity. The theoretical results concur with empirical evidence of cooperation in common pool resources.