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The tragedy of the commons is a concept which states that if many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, such as a pasture, ...
Lloyd published several of his lectures. In his Two Lectures on the Checks to Population (1833) he introduced the concept of the overuse of a common by its commoners (i.e. those with rights of use and access to it), which was later to be developed by the economist H. Scott Gordon and later still by the ecologist Garrett Hardin and termed by Hardin "The Tragedy of the Commons".
The tragedy of the commons was originally mentioned in 1833 by the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd, who was a member of the Royal Society . He offered the example of a hypothetical tract of shared grazing land, in which all of the villagers brought their cows to this common grazing space, resulting in overgrazing and the depletion of ...
A commons failure theory, now called tragedy of the commons, originated in the 18th century. [10] In 1833 William Forster Lloyd introduced the concept by a hypothetical example of herders overusing a shared parcel of land on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze, to the detriment of all users of the common land. [48]
The theory of 'Tragedy of the commons' highlights this, in which each consumer acts to maximize their own utility and thereby relies on others to cut back their own consumption. This will lead to overconsumption and even possibly exhaustion or destruction of the good.
The tragedy of the commons is a type of replenishing resource management dilemma. The dilemma arises when members of a group share a common good. A common good is rivalrous and non-excludable, meaning that anyone can use the resource but there is a finite amount of the resource available and it is therefore prone to overexploitation. [24]
Building upon the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" in Garrett Hardin's pivotal article in Science (1968), [5] Platt and others in the seminar applied behavioral psychology concepts to actions of people operating in social traps.
Hardin's 1968 "Tragedy of the Commons" article calls attention to the problem of human overpopulation, and describes his perception of the current prevailing sentiment, which he asserts was influenced by Adam Smith's invisible hand concept of economics, leading to a general belief "that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society."