  The sustainable use of common-pool resources (CPRs) is a major environmental
governance challenge because of their possible over-exploitation. Research in
this field has overlooked the feedback between user decisions and resource
dynamics. Here we develop an online game to perform a set of experiments in
which users of the same CPR decide on their individual harvesting rates, which
in turn depend on the resource dynamics. We show that, if users share common
goals, a high level of self-organized cooperation emerges, leading to long-term
resource sustainability. Otherwise, selfish/individualistic behaviors lead to
resource depletion ("Tragedy of the Commons"). To explain these results, we
develop an analytical model of coupled resource-decision dynamics based on
optimal control theory and show how this framework reproduces the empirical
results.
