The tragedy of the commons in evolutionary biology.

The tragedy of the commons, the public goods dilemma, and the meaning of rivalry and excludability in evolutionary biology

Problem: In the study of conflicts, both economists and evolutionary biologists use the concepts ‘tragedy of the commons’ and ‘public goods dilemma’. What is the relationship between the economist and evolutionist views of these concepts? Model features: The economics literature defines the tragedy of the commons and the public goods dilemma in terms of rivalry and excludability of the good. In...

Diminishing returns in social evolution: the not-so-tragic commons.

A challenge for evolutionary theory is to understand how cooperation can occur in the presence of competition and cheating, a problem known as the tragedy of commons. Here I examine how varying the fitness returns from reproductive competition or cooperation affects the negative impact of competition on a social group. Varying linear returns does not affect the impact of competition. However, d...

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...

The evolutionary palaeoecology of species and the tragedy of the commons.

The fossil record presents palaeoecological patterns of rise and fall on multiple scales of time and biological organization. Here, we argue that the rise and fall of species can result from a tragedy of the commons, wherein the pursuit of self-interests by individual agents in a larger interactive system is detrimental to the overall performance or condition of the system. Species evolving wit...

Trends in Ecology & Evolution , 2007 1 The Tragedy of the Commons in Evolutionary Biology 2 Daniel