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The metaphor goes as follows: the Commons is a shared plot of grassland used by all livestock farmers in a village. Each farmer keeps adding more livestock to graze on the Commons, because he does not experience a direct cost for doing so. In a few years, the soil is depleted by overgrazing, the Commons becomes unusable and the village perishes.
The cause of any tragedy of the commons is that when individuals use a public good, they do not bear the entire cost of their several actions. If each seeks to maximize individual utility, he ignores the costs borne by others. This is an example of an externality. The best (non-cooperative) short-term strategy for an individual is to try to exploit more than his or her share of public resources. Assuming a majority of individuals follow this strategy, the theory goes, the public resource gets overexploited.
The tragedy of the commons is a source of intense controversy, precisely because it is not clear whether individuals will or will not follow the overexploitation strategy in any given situation. This strategy maximizes personal gain in the short run, but destroys it in the long run. Therefore, it can be expected that a group of far-sighted individuals will not follow it, and make some sort of cooperative agreement with each other to avoid the tragedy of the commons.
The originating metaphor is of a "common", which was not public land — the public at large had very limited rights (e.g. passing drovers could lease grazing for "thistle rent"). Only those locals who were also " commoners" had access to a bundle of rights; each commoner then had an interest in his or her own rights, but the common itself was not property, nor were the rights themselves "property", since they could not be traded or otherwise disposed of. In a traditional village these rights provided commoners with rights of grazing, gathering fuel wood non-destructively "by hook or by crook", etc. (the form "commons" is plural, and refers to the whole group of commons subject to these effects).
Consider an area used for grazing (among other purposes — it could be "Lammas Land", used for private crops in season) that can support 50 cattle indefinitely, a population of 25 peasant householders who keep cattle among a range of subsistence activities, and that each peasant can advantageously graze and profit from 2 cattle indefinitely. By grazing one extra cow, a peasant can make roughly 1/2 extra "profit" at a "cost" of only 1/50. Thus each peasant is logically tempted to keep adding cattle beyond the capacity of the common to sustain them all optimally. Where the grazing area could sustain 50 cattle indefinitely, this increased grazing load could diminish or even destroy the ability of the land to sustain any cattle, at least until it has recovered. (A tragedy of the commons can occur even without complete and permanent destruction of a resource, although such things as overfishing can indeed do that.)
Though this metaphor is not an accurate description of how the system worked during most of its history, it serves here for purposes of illustration. Historically, no single common was ever truly public but was reserved for its own commoners, whose own use was also restricted in various customary ways (which differed from place to place). The system indeed began to behave in the ways described, but that was not its standard mode of operation but rather a late response to internal and external stresses, e.g. from demographic and cultural shifts.
Modern equivalents are pollution of waterways, logging of forests, overfishing of the oceans, tossing of trash out of automobile windows, and e-mail spamming. The contribution of each actor is minute, but summed over all actors, these actions degrade the resource.
The tragedy of the commons can be seen as a collective prisoner's dilemmaThe prisoner's dilemma is a type of non-zero-sum game. In this game theory problem, as in many others, it is assumed that each individual player is trying to maximise his own advantage, without concern for the well-being of the other player. This Nash equ. Individuals within a group have two options: cooperate with the group or defect from the group. Cooperation happens when individuals agree to protect a common resource to avoid the tragedy. By cooperating, every individual agrees not to seek more than their share. Defection happens when an individual decides to use more than their share of a public resource.
Game theoryThis article discusses the mathematical modelling of incentive structures. For other games (and their theories) see Game (disambiguation). Game theory is a branch of mathematics that uses models to study interactions with formalized incentive structures ( shows that cooperation maximizes every individual's benefit in the long run (i.e. the 'tragedy' does not happen, the commons are preserved and can be used indefinitely), while defection maximizes an individual's benefit in the short run at the expense of destroying it in the long run (i.e. the 'tragedy' happens and all individuals lose). Thus, a possible solution to the tragedy of the commons is to simply have a group of far-sighted individuals who can see their long-term interest.Articulating solutions to the tragedy of the commons is also one of the leading problems of political philosophyPolitical philosophy is the study of the fundamental questions about the state, government, politics, property, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and f. Many such solutions involve enforcement of conservation measures by an authority, which may be an outside agency or selected by the resource users themselves, who agree to cooperate to conserve the resource. Another commonly-proposed solution is to convert each common into private property, giving the owner of each an incentive to enforce its sustainability. Effectively, this is what took place in the English " EnclosurePrior to the 18th century, agriculture was much the same across Europe, and had been since before the Middle Ages. The system in operation was essentially post- feudal, with each villager subsistence-farming their own strips of land in one of three large of the Commons"; this case highlights the effects of hidden wealth transfer in privatizationPrivatization (sometimes: denationalization privatisation or — especially in India — disinvestment is the economic process of transferring property, from public ownership to private ownership. An opposite process is nationalization. In theory, privatizati, if no or inadequate matching compensation occurs.
A popular solution to the problem is also the " CoasianIn law and economics, the Coase theorem attributed to Ronald Coase, is a theorem relating to the economic efficiency of a government's allocation of property rights. In essence, the theorem states that in the absence of transaction costs, all government a" one.
Garrett Hardin , in his essay The Tragedy of the Commons, proposed that the solution to the problem of overpopulation must be based on "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" and result in "relinquishing the freedom to breed."| Politics | Business | Finance |
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