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ABSTRACTThe U.S. highway system is an iconic example of civil infrastructure. Yet it also exemplifies the challenges of infrastructure sustainability. The American Society for Civil Engineers gave the American road infrastructure a grade of “D” since the roads “are often crowded, frequently in poor condition, chronically underfunded, and are becoming more dangerous.” In this paper, we seek to understand the intertwined social and technical processes that lead to this unsustainability by examining the U.S. highway system from the perspective of coupled infrastructure systems (CIS), a transdisciplinary framework that aims to analyze governance challenges of shared resources from a dynamic systems perspective. We use highways as a special example of the broader challenge of providing and maintaining the shared infrastructure of all types. Our analysis of historical data concludes that the unsustainability of highways as coupled infrastructure systems can be explained from dysfunctional information feedbacks.

Unreliable public water supplies cause human hardships and are still common worldwide. Households often deal with the issue by adopting various coping strategies that are representative of economic decentralization (e.g., using private wells, sourcing from third‐party vendors) and political decentralization (e.g., making petitions to a public provider). There is growing interest in these user‐level decentralized coping strategies, but their relative effects on provider's behavior and the long‐term sustainability of public water supply remain unclear. This puzzle has not been tackled using an experimental approach. This study reports a controlled behavioral experiment conducted to test the relative effectiveness of different coping strategies on infrastructure quality and users‐provider cooperation in the context of agricultural water supply. We tested experimental treatments involving two classes of coping strategies: exitand voice. The exit option represents users' shift to an alternative water source. The voice option represents users' direct effort to influence a public irrigation service provider. We recruited 272 human subjects into our 4‐player experiment (one provider and three users) and observed and compared their decisions under four treatments (exit, voice, their combination, and no options). The results show that the voice option leads to improved outcomes compared to other choices that include the exit option, suggesting that contrary to previously thought, the exit option can be detrimental to users‐provider cooperation. We also observed that a user tends to cooperate more (pay and use the public service) when other users do the same. We conducted a controlled behavioral experiment on people's coping strategies to unreliable public agricultural water suppliesTested strategies are exit, which means shifting to an alternative water supply, and voice, which means petitioning to a public agencyResults show that contrary to previously thought, the exit option can be detrimental to users‐provider cooperation We conducted a controlled behavioral experiment on people's coping strategies to unreliable public agricultural water supplies Tested strategies are exit, which means shifting to an alternative water supply, and voice, which means petitioning to a public agency Results show that contrary to previously thought, the exit option can be detrimental to users‐provider cooperation