Abstract:" The'tragedy of the commons' arises when it is difficult and costly to exclude
potential users from common-pool resources that yield finite flows of benefits, as a result of
which those resources will be exhausted by rational, utility-maximizing individuals rather ...

I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a
nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical
solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions ...

The previous chapters have developed several fundamental propositions. First, most
obviously, property rights matter. They matter within particular institutions (including firms, as
Barzel explains in chapter 2), and they matter in a more macro sense within societies ...

Abstract Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons model predicts the eventual overexploitation or
degradation of all resources used in common. Given this unambiguous prediction, a
surprising number of cases exist in which users have been able to restrict access to the ...

Abstract The problem of sustaining a public resource that everybody is free to overuse—
the'tragedy of the commons'1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7—emerges in many social dilemmas, such as
our inability to sustain the global climate. Public goods experiments 4, which are used to ...

It is easy to call for interdisciplinary syntheses, but will anyone respond? Scientists know how
to train the young in narrowly focused work; but how do you teach people to stitch together established
specialties that perhaps should not have been separated in the first place? Early in this ...

We analyze a differential game in which all interest groups have access to a common capital
stock. We show that the introduction of a technology that has inferior productivity but enjoys
private access may ameliorate the tragedy of the commons. We use this model to analyze ...

Abstract Today, the word “tragedy” is used to refer generically to anything really bad. The
word has an older meaning, though, referring to literary works that depict a protagonist
caught up in events inexorably leading to his or her doom. Some of that older meaning is ...

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There has developed in the contemporary natural sciences a recognition that there is a
subset of problems, such as population, atomic war, and environmental corruption, for which
there are no technical solutions (1, 2). There is also an increasing recognition among ...