Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons

Trade, Tragedy, and the Commons

Many of the world’s major renewable resource stocks are in a state of decline. This is true for capture fisheries, for forests in developing countries, and for many measures of the biosphere’s health. Other renewable resources, including many species of wildlife, marine mammals, and Coral reefs, are also under threat. While poverty and government corruption are surely responsible for some of th...

The Ultimate Tragedy of Commons

Tragedy of the commons in the chemostat

We present a proof of principle for the phenomenon of the tragedy of the commons that is at the center of many theories on the evolution of cooperation. Whereas the tragedy is commonly set in a game theoretical context, and attributed to an underlying Prisoner's Dilemma, we take an alternative approach based on basic mechanistic principles of species growth that does not rely on the specificati...

Demography and the tragedy of the commons.

Individual success in group-structured populations has two components. First, an individual gains by outcompeting its neighbours for local resources. Second, an individual's share of group success must be weighted by the total productivity of the group. The essence of sociality arises from the tension between selfish gains against neighbours and the associated loss that selfishness imposes by d...

Ecology and the Tragedy of the Commons

This paper develops mathematical models of the tragedy of the commons analogous to ecological models of resource consumption. Tragedies differ fundamentally from predator–prey relationships in nature because human consumers of a resource are rarely controlled solely by that resource. Tragedies do occur, however, at the level of the ecosystem, where multiple species interactions are involved. Hu...