Commons dilemma and the “Tragedy of the Commons”

Abstract

There are a lot of studies on commons dilemma. But few studies succeed to formulate it adequately. Moreover, although there are some situations where the dilemma does not occur, these studies focuses only the case that the dilemma does occur. In the present paper, we formulate the commons dilemma as an N‐person game and examine what situations our formulation represents. We show that there are six regions with respect to the value decrement induced by one additional animal and that commons dilemma does not occur in some of these regions.

Key words:

• Tragedy of the Commons
• Commons Dilemma
• Externality
• Rational man
• Binary choice
• Game theory