From position to payoff: Institutional rules, water allocation, and welfare resilience under groundwater scarcity

This study examines how institutional design shapes welfare differences in shared groundwater irrigation schemes where water allocation is governed by sequential access. Framed field experiments with 60 rice-growing farmers in northern Bangladesh, a drought-prone, groundwater-dependent rice-producing region, model collective action problems as repeated water allocation decisions under alternative institutional rules. The results show that positional asymmetry has direct economic consequences: farmers who extract later receive less water and earn lower payoffs, generating systematic welfare differences along the extraction sequence.