The Tragedy of the Commons
Every herder gains by putting one more animal on the shared field. The field is destroyed by people behaving reasonably.
196815 min read
American political economy and institutional analysis
Elinor Ostrom
1933 – 2012
Political economist at Indiana University and the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, awarded in 2009 for her analysis of economic governance and especially the commons. Her fieldwork on irrigation systems, fisheries, forests and alpine pastures showed that communities routinely build durable rules for shared resources without either privatisation or state control, and she distilled the recurring features of the successful cases into eight design principles.