The NATCOOP project set out to study how nature shapes the preferences and incentives of economic agents and how this in turn affects common-pool resource management. Imagine a group of fishermen targeting a species that requires a lot of teamwork to harvest. Do these fishers become more social over time compared to fishers that work in a more solitary manner? If so, does this have implications for how the fishery should be managed?

To study this, the NATCOOP team travelled to Chile and Tanzania and collected data using surveys and economic experiments. These two very different countries have a large population of small-scale fishermen, and both host several distinct types of fisheries. Over the course of five field trips, the project team surveyed more than 2500 fishermen with each field trip contributing to the main research question by measuring fishermen’s preferences for cooperation and risk. Additionally, each fieldtrip aimed to answer another smaller research question that was either focused on risk taking or cooperation behavior in the fisheries.

The data from both surveys and experiments are now publicly available and can be freely studied by other researchers, resource managers, or interested citizens. Overall, the NATCOOP dataset contains participants’ responses to a plethora of survey questions and their actions during incentivized economic experiments. It is available in both the .dta and .csv format, and its use is recommended with statistical software such as R or Stata. For those unaccustomed with statistical analysis, we included a video tutorial on how to use the data set in the open-source program R.