Part 5. The Tragedy of the Commons (2) – Related Activities
Many games, theories and examples were inspired by the tragedy of the commons. Here are three activities which are related with the tragedy of the commons. First one is “Fishers”; there are some variations of Fishers game in schools. Second one is “Sharing Bandwidth”; it is a motivation of how to use a bandwidth in a communication line. The last one is an example of economics professor at Texas Tech.
1. Fishers
Families who live near a lake need to do fishing in the lake every day from starvation. There are n families and each family need s amount of fish to survive. Families can sell the fish that are exceeded for some price p; these benefits increase the families wealth. Most of the families want to increase their wealth; therefore, the population of the fish in the lake will decrease rapidly. Finally, families cannot earn lots of money because they did fishing excessively.
2. Sharing Bandwidth
Players have to share their one channel to send their information as much as possible in this game. However, the captivity of the channel is only 1. Player i intends to send xi units of information along the channel, where xi is a value between 0 and 1. However, the quality of the channel deteriorates with the total bandwidth used. If the total bandwidth T = Σj xj exceeds the channel capacity (T > 1), no player gets any benefit. If T < 1, player i gets benefit xi (1 – T). The game is continued either N iterations or until a score of some player exceed a given threshold. Therefore, in this game, players not only consider their own benefit, but also think about total bandwidth increasing.
3. An Example in Economics Class
An economics professor at Texas Tech did not give any F to his students, but he gave F to all of his students because of the experiment. He suggested his students to do an experiment in early of the semester. The experiment was that all grades in the class would be averaged and everyone in the class would get same grade. At first, most of the students welcomed the experiment. At the first exam, all students got B (B was averaged grade at the first exam). However, at the second exam, every student got D. Finally, all students got F at the last exam. All students in this class thought that they did not need to study hard because they would get same grade with other students even if they did not focus carefully in the class.
It shows another negative aspect of the tragedy of the commons. This experiment also includes the problems of Socialism and public welfare. Even if people are sharing their grades, lands or money, they did not work actively if there is no or very low benefit.
Verba Volant, Scripta Manent 