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Tragedy of the Commons

📈 Economics By CampusDown Wiki Editorial Team Last updated
Quick answer: the tragedy of the commons is when everyone using a shared resource for their own gain ends up destroying it. Individually rational choices produce a collectively bad result.
Contents
  1. 1. Hardin's argument
  2. 2. Common-pool resources
  3. 3. Examples
  4. 4. Remedies
  5. 5. References

Hardin's argument

In a 1968 essay in Science, biologist Garrett Hardin described a common pasture. Each herder gains fully from adding an animal but shares the cost of overgrazing, so all keep adding animals until the pasture is ruined.

Common-pool resources

They are rival, since one person's use reduces what is left, yet hard to exclude others from, which invites free riding and negative externalities.

Examples

  • Overfishing
  • Groundwater depletion
  • Air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions

Remedies

  • Regulation: quotas, taxes, permits
  • Property rights: privatization or tradable quotas
  • Community governance: Elinor Ostrom documented communities that sustained resources using design principles such as clear boundaries, user-made rules, monitoring and graduated sanctions.

References

  1. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243-1248.
  2. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
  3. Dietz, T., Ostrom, E., & Stern, P. C. (2003). The struggle to govern the commons. Science, 302(5652), 1907-1912.

Reports and materials that use this theory (Korean)

There are no materials dedicated to this theory yet, but you can search related reports in the CampusDown library (Korean).

Find more reports · Search '공유지의 비극' on CampusDown →
Complexity TheoryComplexity theory explained: systems of many interacting parts from which hard-to-predict order emerges. Emergence, self-organization, nonlinearity and path dependence, the Santa Fe Institute, Schelling's segregation model, applications in sociology and public administration, and limits.👥 SociologyBehavioral FinanceBehavioral finance explained: how psychology and cognitive biases shape investment decisions and prices. Covers Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory, loss aversion, overconfidence, the disposition effect, herding and limits to arbitrage.📈 EconomicsEconomies of ScaleEconomies of scale explained: falling long-run average cost as output grows, causes such as specialisation and spreading fixed costs, diseconomies of scale, minimum efficient scale, economies of scope, and natural monopoly.📈 EconomicsFactor Endowment Theory (Heckscher-Ohlin)The Heckscher-Ohlin factor endowment theory: countries have a comparative advantage in goods that use their abundant factors intensively. Assumptions, contrast with Ricardo, factor price equalization, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem and the Leontief paradox.📈 Economics

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This article was last updated on October 15, 2026. It is based on widely recognized original works and textbooks; when citing it in a paper, please check the original sources listed in the references.