codzienność: Tragedy of the commons

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The tragedy of the commons is the idea that when a resource is shared and can benefit the individual at a cost to the community, it is rational for the individual to overuse the resource, even though this collectively leads to the depletion of the resource for everyone. The concept has been widely discussed and criticized in economics, ecology, and other sciences. The metaphorical term is the title of a 1968 essay by ecologist, microbiologist and ethno-nationalist Garrett Hardin. Versions of this concept extend back to classical antiquity, being discussed by Aristotle. The principal concern of Hardin's essay was overpopulation of the planet. To prevent the inevitable tragedy (he argued) it…

Evidence: 61 • authority: 72

In economics, the free-rider problem is a type of market failure that occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods and common pool resources do not pay for them or under-pay. Free riders may overuse common pool resources by not paying for them, neither directly through fees or tolls, nor indirectly through taxes. Consequently, the common pool resource may be under-produced, overused, or degraded. Additionally, despite evidence that people tend to be cooperative by nature (a prosocial behaviour), the presence of free-riders has been shown to cause cooperation to deteriorate, perpetuating the free-rider problem. In social science, the free-rider problem is the question of how to…

Evidence: 48 • authority: 88

When is the Tragedy of the Commons Not a Tragedy?. Economists tend to rely upon tried and true examples to make their theoretical points. Since H. Scott Gordon’s 1954 article entitled “The Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource: The Fishery,” the overexploitation of an open-access resource has been a usual presentation in any discussion that deals with aligning incentives with appropriate outcomes. However, just as Ronald H. Coase (1974) showed that a lighthouse is not the best example of a public good, and Steven Cheung’s discovery (1973) that bees, in most cases, do not provide an unpriced externality, we also need to rethink how we present the over-exploitation of open-access reso…

Evidence: 42 • authority: 72

Community management or common-pool resource management is the management of a common resource or issue by a community through the collective action of volunteers and stakeholders. The resource managed can be either material or informational. Examples include the management of common grazing and water rights, fisheries, and open-source software. In the case of physical resources, community management strategies are frequently employed to avoid the tragedy of the commons and to encourage sustainability. It is expected that community management allows for the management, usually of natural resources, to come from members of the community that these decisions will affect. This should allow for…

Evidence: 42 • authority: 88

Population Growth and the Tragedy of the Commons: Can Trade Prevent Natural Resource and Welfare Collapse?. Many developing countries depend crucially on open-access renewable natural resources (NR). Trade is generally viewed as hurting the long-term health of NR in commodity-exporting countries. I examine whether trade might be beneficial in the case of population growth. Dynamic general equilibrium NR models have typically assumed constant return to scale in the manufacturing sector. I examine trade's impact under constant, decreasing and increasing returns. While population growth always results in NR and welfare collapse under autarky, the impact under trade depends critically on t…

Evidence: 36 • authority: 88

The Subgroup Problem: When Can Binding Voting on Extractions from a Common Resource Pool Overcome the Tragedy of the Commons?. Using a common pool resource game protocol with voting we examine experimentally how cooperation varies with the level at which (binding) votes are aggregated. Our results are broadly in line with theoretical predictions. When players can vote on the behavior of the whole group or when leaders from each group can vote for the group as a whole, extraction levels from the common resource pool are close to the social optimum. When players extract resources individually, there is substantial overextraction. When players vote in subgroups, there is initially less overext…

Evidence: 36 • authority: 72

A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was more famously interpreted in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples o…

Evidence: 36 • authority: 80

Population Growth and the Tragedy of the Commons: Can Trade Prevent Natural Resource and Welfare Collapse?

Evidence: — • authority: 92

Self-organization of common good usage and an application to Internet services.. Natural and human-made common goods present key challenges due to their susceptibility to degradation, overuse, and congestion. We explore the self-organization of their usage when individuals have access to several available commons but limited information on them. We propose an extension of the Win-Stay, Lose-Shift (WSLS) strategy for such systems, in which individuals use a resource repeatedly until they are unsuccessful and then shift randomly. This simple and completely decentralized strategy promotes balanced resource use based solely on individual experience, as it does not require communication between…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Commonize Costs–Privatize Profits Game (or CC–PP Game) is a concept developed by the ecologist Garrett Hardin to describe a "game" (in the game theory sense) widely played in matters of resource allocation. The concept is Hardin's interpretation of the closely related phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons, and is referred to in political discourse as "privatizing profits and socializing losses." The CC–PP Game originally appeared in Hardin's book titled Filters against Folly: How To Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent which was published in 1986. Players of the CC–PP Game aim to commonize the costs (or externalities) generated by their activities acr…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom (née Awan; August 7, 1933 – June 12, 2012) was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson; she was the first woman to win the prize. Trained in political science at UCLA, Ostrom was a faculty member at Indiana University Bloomington for 47 years. Beginning in the 1960s, Ostrom was involved in resource management policy and created a research center, the Workshop in Political…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Global commons is a concept to describe international, supranational, and global resource domains in which common-pool resources are found. They are "areas that lie outside of the political reach of any one nation State". Global commons include the earth's shared natural resources, such as the high seas (international waters), the atmosphere and outer space and the Antarctic in particular. The global commons concept investigates how those shared resources that lie outside of national borders can be managed or governed.