Making Rules for Governing Global Commons

Governing the Global Commons with Local Institutions

Most problems faced by modern human society have two characteristics in common--they are tragedy-of-the-commons type of problems, and they are global problems. Tragedy-of-the-commons type of problems are those where a commonly shared resource is overexploited by free riders at the expense of everyone sharing the resource. The exploitation of global resources such as clean air and water, politic...

Governing the Spectrum Commons : a Framework for Rules Based on Principles of Common - Pool Resource Management

GOVERNING THE COMMONS : The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences sponsored a conference in Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss common property resource management. This conference was a watershed in the development of the theoretical underpinning of institutional design for successful common pool resource (CPR) management. Since then, an international network of over 2,000 researchers has developed, and the International...

Governing the Anti-commons: Institutional Design for Standard Setting Organizations

Shared technology platforms are often governed by standard setting organizations (SSOs), where interested parties use a consensus process to address problems of technical coordination and platform provision. Economists have modeled SSOs as certification agents, bargaining forums, collective licensing arrangements and R&D consortia. This paper integrates these diverse perspectives by adapting El...

Dynamic Mechanism Design for a Global Commons

We model dynamic mechanisms for a global commons. Countries benefit from both consumption and aggregate conservation of an open access resource. A country’s relative value of consumption-to-conservation is privately observed and evolves stochastically. An optimal quota maximizes world welfare subject to being implementable by Perfect Bayesian equilibria. With complete information, the optimal q...