Tragedy Of Commons Research Articles

Potential for improvement in governance and national action plans to overcome antimicrobial resistance

With more than 1·2 million deaths directly attributable to infections with resistant bacteria in 2019, 1 Antimicrobial Resistance CollaboratorsGlobal burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis. Lancet. 2022; 399: 629-655 Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (1168) Google Scholar the constantly increasing burden of antimicrobial resistance is a leading cause of death, disability, and economic loss in every region and country globally. Antimicrobials are a global public good that need protection from a “tragedy of the commons”. 2 World Bank GroupDrug-resistant infections. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/323311493396993758/pdf/final-report.pdfDate: 2017 Date accessed: December 2, 2022 Google Scholar Protecting people from overuse of antibiotics, misuse of antibiotics, and infections, particularly infections with resistant bacteria, requires both global action and nationally targeted responses. However, antimicrobial resistance is a complex multisectoral and multifactorial process. Interventions should be coordinated via overarching plans that are sustained by robust governance frameworks. For example, member countries of WHO endorsed the Global Action Plan (GAP) on antimicrobial resistance in 2015, which explicitly requests countries develop national action plans (NAPs), identify priorities, allocate resources for NAP implementation, and establish national and local governance arrangements. Measuring the global response to antimicrobial resistance, 2020–21: a systematic governance analysis of 114 countriesInternational efforts to control antimicrobial resistance varied considerably between countries. Monitoring and evaluation efforts need improving for continuous understanding of national and international progress. International response might not be commensurate with the scale and severity of antimicrobial resistance. Full-Text PDF Open Access

The Declining Ogallala Aquifer and the Future Role of Rangeland Science on the North American High Plains

The Ogallala Aquifer region, located in the Great Plains of the central United States, is the largest freshwater aquifer in North America, supporting one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world. In this paper, we discuss the history of settlement and water use in this region, from the Homestead Act and the Dust Bowl to modern irrigation systems. While many improvements to irrigation technology and water-efficient crops have helped to prolong the life of the Ogallala, continued use of this finite resource is leading to a tragedy of the commons, wherein difficult land management decisions will have to be made by this century's end. We posit that the art and science of rangeland management stands uniquely poised to tackle this challenge directly through creative integration, where appropriate, of native rangeland restoration, improved pasture management, integrated crop-livestock systems, and regenerative agricultural practices aimed at preserving soil and rangeland health, thereby providing continuity in the ability of the Ogallala region to continue to provide food, fiber, and other ecosystem services both locally and globally. Furthermore, we provide discussion on future research, extension, and educational needs to consider as the exploration for adaptive solutions are developed and evaluated in the coming decades.

The Tragedy of the Commons and the Battle For Water in Mexico

Published in 1968, Garrett Hardin’s article entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been a foundational article in both environmental and corporate social responsibility research. Hardin argues that there are a finite number of natural resources in the world and these resources can only support a finite population. Hardin also argues that individuals will not take a utilitarian approach in the management of resources that are available to all. The tragedy of the commons theory is that if people have access to “free” resources, they will abuse the privilege in using them. Elinor Ostrom responded to the Tragedy of the Commons theory with her seminal work “Governing the Commons” which presents the argument that self-governing institutional arrangements made among critical stakeholders can effectively manage the commons. The article concludes with an example of the challenges in Mexico for managing the commons of water, and the challenges and successes of stakeholders self-governing this vital resource.

Examining the rationality of free riding: A multifaceted analysis

Free riding, characterized by individuals benefiting from shared resources without contributing equitably, presents a pervasive challenge across diverse domains. This paper leverages insights from game theory to analyze strategic interactions and decision-making within scenarios involving shared resources. It employs classic games such as The Prisoner's Dilemma and The Tragedy of the Commons as illustrative examples, offering deeper insights into the rational choices individuals make when deciding whether to cooperate or free ride. Furthermore, the paper incorporates perspectives from behavioral economics and seminal economic theories, including public goods theory, the tragedy of the commons, game theory, principal-agent theory, and market failure with externalities. Through rigorous examination and analysis, our aim is to contribute to the growing body of knowledge surrounding free riding and its implications for economic decision-making and societal well-being.

Progress in the theoretical understanding and governance of "tragedy of the commons" and the implications for sustainable development

Progress in the theoretical understanding and governance of "tragedy of the commons" and the implications for sustainable development

On Who Should Pay When Orbital Debris “Trickles-Down” in a Tragedy of the Low Earth Orbit Commons

In March 2023, NASA released the most rigorous and wide-reaching orbital debris analysis in the space law literature that provides a cost-benefit analysis of removing orbital debris from low Earth orbit (LEO), a region of the Earth’s environment with no environmental regulation. NASA contextualized the motivation in releasing this report as rooted in the exponential growth of the commercial satellite industry, noting that “the number of tracked and untracked debris in LEO is projected to grow . . . even if no new satellites are launched into space, yet launch traffic is likely to increase in the coming decade compared to recent history.” Similarly, in a May 2023 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, the CBO argued that the “number of satellites operating in LEO has increased significantly in recent years, driven in large part by commercial [satellite] constellations,” which are networks of identical satellites whose orbits and positions are coordinated to accomplish a given mission, such as providing global broadband internet. Underscoring the dangers of launching thousands of satellites into a finite orbital space with no environmental regulation, SpaceX, who operates the world’s largest constellation, Starlink, reported that from December 2022 to May 2023, Starlink had to perform 25,299 collision avoidance maneuvers in LEO. This number of collision avoidance maneuvers is double the number of maneuvers reported by SpaceX during the previous six-month period, which is alarming to industry experts. Concerning the risks that satellite constellations pose to the sustainability of LEO, experts note that the global space market grew by 8% to $424 billion in 2022 and is expected to be valued at more than $737 billion by 2030, which is a market that will certainly be impacted if LEO is enshrouded in an impenetrable maelstrom of orbital debris moving at speeds seven times faster than a bullet. Cross-referencing the most current orbital debris numbers from the European Space Agency with NASA’s estimated costs of $300 per debris removed with ground-based lasers, and $6,000 per debris removed with space-based lasers, the total estimated cost to remove the 1,036,500 trackable pieces of orbital debris from LEO is from $310 million to $6.2 billion. On the other hand, the cost to remove the estimated 130 million pieces of currently untraceable orbital debris from LEO is from $39 to $780 billion, all of which is a sizeable liability for the United States (U.S.) government to allocate to the U.S. taxpayer. Indeed, under both the Outer Space Treaty and the Proposed ORBITS Act of 2023, which is a bipartisan bill recently unanimously passed by the U.S. Senate, the U.S. taxpayer will be left with footing the bill for remediating the debris left behind by U.S.-authorized commercial satellite operators. Describing the LEO environment as a classical “tragedy of the commons” and drawing from studies conducted by NASA, the Government Accountability Office, the CBO, United Nations, and others, the purpose of this article is to tackle the question of who should pay when orbital debris “trickles down” in a manner that compromises Earth’s satellite-reliant infrastructure and otherwise causes damage to Earth’s environment, persons, and property. This article then recommends specific language to amend Title III of the Communications Act of 1934, which created and charged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with regulating commercial satellite systems, to establish a satellite constellation “orbital use fee” (OUF), which the FCC will levy as a requirement for receiving a license to operate in LEO. This OUF will then fund orbital debris remediation projects, related research, and remediation of the environmental impacts of satellite constellations. Given that the U.S. leads the world in the total number of satellites in space per country, and SpaceX will own more satellites than each country in the world combined once it fully deploys Starlink, this article concludes by arguing that the U.S. is uniquely positioned to engage its allies in forging the foundation of customary international space law. First, through passing into law the types of model legislation provided in this article, which will then form the basis of bilateral and multilateral treaty negotiations with both current and potential space-faring nations. This legislative and diplomatic strategy will help to operationalize the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) proclamation establishing space as the “province of all mankind,” and promote its peaceful use and exploration for the “benefit and in the interests of all countries.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled: An Interdisciplinary Analysis

The study proposes a theoretical analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fourth novel, using the storytelling forms proposed by Kurt Vonnegut, along with the Freudian and Jungian oneiric theories, in order to decide the Kafkaesque texture of the narrative. The protagonist Ryder can open secret portals to physical places in his past and can reconfigure his reality based on memories. Firstly, the study discusses the intertextual connection of The Unconsoled with Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography while treating its Kantian value according to the domino effect and the quantum principle of probability. The second part analyses Ishiguro’s dream techniques, in conjunction with concepts like the Pygmalion and Golem effects, the imposter syndrome, the tunnel memory and Kahneman’s system 1 and 2 of thinking, for explaining Ryder’s irrational doings. The last part examines Ryder’s cognitive dissonance, his lack of anagnorisis, as well as his flow of consciousness, as compared to Woolf ‘s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Odysseus. The protagonist’s need for mental decluttering and willpower is then explained through the Stoic principles in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, as a way to strike a balance between creation and consumption, both in Ishiguro’s novel and in real life. The problems of the nameless European city are also interpreted from a game theoretical perspective, with the tragedy of the commons and the public goods game as examples of faulty cost-benefit relationships. Holistically speaking, the study highlights the meditative power of The Unconsoled, focusing on the narrative’s similitudes to the semantic-linguistic incomprehensibility of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

Seeding leading cooperators and institutions in networked climate dilemmas

Global cooperation poses problems shaped by the effects of stakeholders’ decisions on future losses, and how collective risks are perceived. Institutional sanctioning of free-riders may prevent widespread defection in this context. Yet, the prevalence of such institutions represents another second-order dilemma, often as tricky as the tragedy of the commons we aim to avert. Here, we combine evolutionary game theory with techniques widely used in marketing to find, target, and seed leaders and institutions’ promoters to boost cooperation in climate dilemmas. By doing so, we identify the increase in cooperation when introducing a heterogeneous networked population and the conditions under which seeding policies can ensure the self-organization of cooperation and stable institutions. Counter-intuitively, we show that seeding a small fraction of institutional supporters at random network positions practically is as good policy as seeding highly central players in climate dilemmas. We show that cooperation and institutions prevalence are mainly determined by the interaction network and, to a less extent, by imitation ties, and that seeding cooperators only offers marginal benefits when compared with directly seeding sanctioning institutions. Our study also presents a way of incorporating costs when deciding the best policy to apply. Finally, this work suggests that the potential benefits of seeding and targeting techniques are not exclusive to collective dilemmas and can be applied to other dilemmas having structured populations.

Socioeconomic dilemmas of commercial markets for invasive species: lessons from lionfish in Mexico

Abstract “If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em”: the development of commercial markets is an emerging strategy to control invasive species. This strategy may have fewer unintended ecological impacts than genetic modification and biological control; however, its unintended social impacts are poorly understood. We discuss the social dilemmas and opportunities created by commercializing invasive species, based on the experiences of fishing cooperatives’ harvest of invasive lionfish (Pterois sp.) in the Mexican Caribbean. In Cozumel, Mexico, a pilot commercial fishery began in 2012, and by 2015 had seemingly succeeded at reducing local lionfish abundance. However, three social dilemmas have accompanied this process. First, though designed to support sustainability, this market disproportionately benefits fishers that use fishing gear considered "unsustainable". Second, this strategy reinforces the narrative of fishers trapped in a “tragedy of the commons,” while simultaneously depending on the fishers’ participation. Finally, the programme's very success has led to its own demise, disproportionately affecting the programme's most invested participants. These and similar dilemmas may be inevitable when systems in place for sustainable resource harvest are repurposed for resource collapse. However, fishing cooperatives have managed to navigate these dilemmas in partnership with governmental and non-governmental organization (NGO) advocates to position themselves as conservation leaders.

Faustian bargains: Short-term and long-term contingencies in phylogeny, ontogeny, and sociogeny.

Rachlin's interpretations of self-control depend on the short-term versus the long-term consequences of behavior. Sometimes these effects support each other (typing an abstract produces a written product now and is later read by others). Sometimes they conflict (procrastination now is incompatible with finishing the abstract by deadline). We usually reserve the language of self-control for human cases where long-term consequences are chosen over short-term ones. Rachlin made this distinction salient in ontogeny, but it also applies to selection in phylogeny (Darwinian evolution) and sociogeny (behavior passed from one organism to another). Our account examines relations between short-term and long-term consequences at each level of selection. For example, sexual selection has adaptive, short-term mating consequences but may drive species to extreme specializations that jeopardize long-term survival. In sociogeny, as in the Tragedy of the Commons, group members may get immediate economic benefits from exploiting resources but exhaust those resources over the long term. Whatever the level, when short-term and long-term consequences have opposing effects, adaptive behavior may depend on whether temporally extended contingencies exert more control than more immediate benefits.

Social dilemma in the excess use of antimicrobials incurring antimicrobial resistance

The emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) caused by the excess use of antimicrobials has come to be recognized as a global threat to public health. There is a ‘tragedy of the commons’ type social dilemma behind this excess use of antimicrobials, which should be recognized by all stakeholders. To address this global threat, we thus surveyed eight countries/areas to determine whether people recognize this dilemma and showed that although more than half of the population pays little, if any, attention to it, almost 20% recognize this social dilemma, and 15–30% of those have a positive attitude toward solving that dilemma. We suspect that increasing individual awareness of this social dilemma contributes to decreasing the frequency of AMR emergencies.

A regulatory arbitrage game: Off-balance-sheet leverage and financial fragility

This study examines a simple banking system in a game-theoretic framework wherein banks act as self-interested agents to maximize leverage at the expense of overall financial stability. The resultant strategic inefficiency raises concerns about how banks manage the "financial stability" good, which is appropriated into a "tragedy of the commons." We conceptualize the inefficiency using the price of anarchy introduced by Koutsoupias & Papadimitriou (2009). We seek the optimal regulatory framework that minimizes the price of anarchy or the degree of financial fragility.

What Nature Gave Us: Steven Pinker on the Rules of Reason

Abstract Steven Pinker argues that rationality represents both a “patrimony,” a human endowment exhibited even in the behaviors of “primitive” societies, and a powerful force for good. At the same time, Pinker describes rationality as a “scarce” resource in the contemporary world, one that must be defined, defended, and deployed against the many destructive forms of irrationality to which we are prone. In order to avert a looming “Tragedy of the Commons,” Pinker proposes that rationality should be considered not just a cognitive benefit but a moral imperative. In doing so, however, he argues against the Enlightenment tradition in which the individual, rather than the “Commons,” is the final arbiter. The fundamental tension in Pinker’s argument is between a “primitive” process of collective reasoning that produces a stable but nonprogressive society and a “modern” orientation toward the individual that has brought us to the brink of political chaos and ecological disaster.

Data, governance and tackling the “tragedy of the commons”

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of active and continued public engagement in the debate regarding the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI). The results of several studies are presented, in reference to the benefits of this technology, its risks and limitations, and the shortcomings of traditional and hybrid approaches. Certain conceptual and practical approaches are presented, that aim to facilitate the participation of citizens and other stakeholders in the decision-making process of AI governance.

Rationality Now!

Rationality Now!

Price and Risk Awareness for Data Offloading Decision-Making in Edge Computing Systems

The proliferation of multiaccess edge computing (MEC) paradigm has created a challenging multiuser–multiserver–multiaccess edge computing competitive environment, which brings the problem of data offloading decision-making to the forefront of research. In this article, we address this issue while jointly studying the impact of the user behavioral characteristics and the MEC servers pricing policies on determining the optimal user data offloading strategies. Prospect theory is exploited to reflect the user satisfaction and subjectivity from the data offloading, while the MEC servers’ probability of failure owing to the potential overexploitation by the users, is modeled via the theory of tragedy of the commons. A multileader multifollower Stackelberg game is formulated among the MEC servers (leaders) and the users (followers), to determine the servers’ optimal pricing policies and the users’ optimal data offloading strategies. The users’ data offloading decision-making is formulated as a noncooperative game among them and a Nash equilibrium is determined, while the MEC servers’ optimal computing service prices are obtained either through a semiautonomous game-theoretic approach, or through a fully autonomous reinforcement learning-based approach. The performance evaluation and demonstration of the superiority of the proposed framework against other benchmarking alternatives is achieved via modeling and simulation.

Nursing shortages and the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’: the demand for a morally just global response

Nursing shortages and the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’: the demand for a morally just global response

Political Communication as a Tragedy of the Commons

In this article, we argue that many contemporary challenges to democracy can be traced back to how political organizations compete for attention. We begin with the idea that these organizations appeal for attention both by mobilizing their own members, and also through media that reaches a wider audience, such as social media and mass media. But since many organizations are competing for the limited attention of this wider audience, they all have an incentive to send “too many” and “too sensational” messages. This overwhelms the audience and leads to polarization and populism. Our article describes the conditions necessary for this “tragedy of the commons” to occur and also reviews empirical evidence demonstrating that these conditions are met. We find that social media is not a necessary condition for the model, but does accelerate it. We conclude that Elinor Ostrom’s theories of the commons are important for understanding political communication.

General non-linear imitation leads to limit cycles in eco-evolutionary dynamics

Eco-evolutionary dynamics is crucial to understand how individuals’ behaviors and the surrounding environment interplay with each other. Typically, it is assumed that individuals update their behaviors via linear imitation function, i.e., the replicator dynamics. It has been proved that there cannot be limit circles in such eco-evolutionary dynamics. It suggests that eco-evolutionary dynamics alone is not sufficient to explain the widely observed fluctuating behavior in both the biological and social systems. We extrapolate from the linear imitation function to general imitation function, which can be non-linear. It is shown that the general imitation does not change the internal equilibrium and its local stability. It however leads to limit cycles, which are never present in classical eco-evolutionary dynamics. Moreover, the average cooperation level and average environment state agree with the first and the second component of the internal fixed point. Furthermore, we estimate the location of the emergent limit cycle. On the one hand, our results provide an alternative mechanism to make cooperators and defectors coexist in a periodic way in the “tragedy of the commons” and indicates the global eco-evolutionary dynamics is sensitive to the imitation function. Our work indicates that the way of imitation, i.e., the imitation function, is crucial in eco-evolutionary dynamics, which is not true for evolutionary dynamics with a static environment.

Заперечення Голодомору: методи та наративи

Hiding of the mass extermination, denying the very fact of extermination are essential components of the crime of genocide. The article analyzes the stages of denial of the Holodomor, highlights the models of this denial, as well as the evolution of the main narratives that opponents of the genocidal qualification of the Holodomor are trying to spread. The Soviet Union consistently denied the Holodomor 1932–1933 and actively opposed the dissemination of information about it. The communist regime’s denial of reality was so widespread and pervasive, that even in 1930th in official documents of state and party authorities marked “for official use” and in some cases even “top secret”, the word “famine” was hardly used. Soviet authorities called the catastrophic famine “food shortages” caused by crop failures. Simultaneously with the blocking of information about the Holodomor, the communist regime resorted to a counter-propaganda operation, which consisted in refuting those reports of starvation and deaths, which, despite all the efforts of the Soviet secret services, infiltrated the West. In the USSR communist authorities used tactics that could be described as “aggressive erasure” to deny the Holodomor. This campaign was a combination of destruction of documentary evidence of a crime with the active intimidation of witnesses, who were unequivocally made aware that they must forget everything they saw. Authorities used repression against those who tried to preserve the memory about the Holodomor. In the late 1980s the soviet communists had to admit that the famine of 1932–1933 did occur in Ukraine, but as an official explanation for those events was proposed a version that absolved the Kremlin of responsibility for the multimillion casualties of the Holodomor. Soviet propaganda claimed that the causes of the famine were: objective difficulties in the period of agricultural transformation, organizational weakness of the newly established collective farms, lack of experienced personnel and agricultural machinery, sabotage by the kulaks etc. The main negative role was allegedly played by the disorganization of agricultural production, which, in turn, was caused by the abandonment of “the Lenin plan of cooperation” of farmers, and the accelerated pace of collectivization. At the same time, the propaganda called the accelerated pace of collectivization a forced step by the Soviet government, which felt threatened by the external invasion of the imperialist states and therefore had to prepare country for war at a rapid pace. At the same time, soviet propaganda continued to deny fact that the famine was anti-Ukrainian. The communist regime claimed that the famine affected the entire territory of the USSR, ad had no local specifics in Ukraine and others regions of the country with densely Ukrainian population (especially the Kuban). Calling the famine a “common tragedy of the entire Soviet Union” authorities insisted that its intensity throughout the USSR seemed to be the same everywhere. Denial of the Holodomor did not stop after the collapse of the USSR. At the beginning of the XXI century struggle against the recognition of the Holodomor as an act of genocide has become one of the priorities of the policy of memory in the Russian Federation. The main narratives of denying the Holodomor today are the allegations that the famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine was not intentional, was not related to the anti-Ukrainian policy of the Bolsheviks, did not have fatal demographic and social consequences. A characteristic feature of the denial of the Holodomor in Russia in the second half of the 2000s was its twofold nature: along with the moderate denial of an academic nature there was an aggressive propaganda narrative of polemical and journalistic denial, the main purpose of which was anti-Ukrainian mobilization of Russian society.