Tragedy of the Commons
Garreth Harding, in a classic and often quoted essay, had argued that the Commons inevitably leads to the abuse of common resources. The essay is located at http://dieoff.org/page95.htm
The author himself "has criticized misinterpretations of his work with the lament that "The title of my 1968 paper should have been The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons. (cited here [1])
Definition
"The tragedy of the commons is a type of social trap that involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. The term derives originally from a parable published by William Forster Lloyd in his 1833 book on population. It was then popularized and extended by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons".[1] However, the theory itself is as old as Aristotle who said: "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it"." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)
Summary
"Hardin explains his “Tragedy of the Commons in the following way. “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons.
“As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another….
“But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy.
“Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.
“The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
In 1968 Hardin was able to articulate the following example, one that we face today. Our “National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit” but “the parks themselves are limited in extent whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone.” (http://www.openeducation.net/2008/02/21/the-digital-commons-%e2%80%93-left-unregulated-are-we-destined-for-tragedy/)
Discussion
Flaming as a Tragedy of the Commons
Clay Shirky: "Flaming is one of a class of economic problems known as The Tragedy of the Commons. Briefly stated, the tragedy of the commons occurs when a group holds a resource, but each of the individual members has an incentive to overuse it. (The original essay used the illustration of shepherds with common pasture. The group as a whole has an incentive to maintain the long-term viability of the commons, but with each individual having an incentive to overgraze, to maximize the value they can extract from the communal resource.) In the case of mailing lists (and, again, other shared conversational spaces), the commonly held resource is communal attention. The group as a whole has an incentive to keep the signal-to-noise ratio low and the conversation informative, even when contentious. Individual users, though, have an incentive to maximize expression of their point of view, as well as maximizing the amount of communal attention they receive. It is a deep curiosity of the human condition that people often find negative attention more satisfying than inattention, and the larger the group, the likelier someone is to act out to get that sort of attention." (http://shirky.com/writings/group_user.html)
More by Shirky on the group 'as its own worst enemy', at http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html; the highly recommended Shirky archive is at http://shirky.com
The Tragedy of the Anti-Commons
Steve Webber on the "the tragedy of the anti-commons." Let's say I'm a researcher working at a small biotech firm here in the Bay Area. And I think there's something interesting I would like to do with a particular molecule and its interaction with a particular gene. Much of this stuff is now patented, and there are so many competing patent claims on so many different parts of the things I would need to work on, that the cost of actually figuring out what permissions I need are astronomical. So lots of small companies simply can't work on it.
They call it the tragedy of the anti-commons in the sense that in order to work on this, they've got to get a permission to use this molecule and a license to play with this gene. That's just too expensive, so they walk away from it. I don't have a quantitative model that can describe for you how much wasted effort or dead weight results from this problem. But I can tell you, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence. There are companies that patent gene sequences, knowing full well that these patents would never be upheld in court, because they haven't added any value. They also know full well that if a pharmaceutical company decides it wants to do something with that gene, it's more likely just to pay the company $150,000 or $200,000, rather than spend a year or 18 months fighting the patent in court. It's kind of tragic."
See the related entries on:
More Information
- The Wikipedia article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- Essay by Eleanor Ostrom: Coping with Tragedies of the Commons