A Partnership Solution to the Tragedy of the Commons

"This paper introduces a management regime that would maintain common property rights by allowing resource users to harvest on their own but to share their extraction outcome with a given number of other resource users. The developed partnership approach makes use of the shirkingincentives in output sharing partnerships to counterbalance the incentive to supply excessive effort that prevails in noncooperative common property extraction. A first-best solution is derived and thesocially optimal partnership size and number of partnerships for a fixed number of harvesters is determined for different conjectural variations. The results provide a new interpretation of conjecturalvariations in the supply of harvesting effort as it establishes some links to community boundaries, social capital and resource characteristics. The implication of community boundaries and authority systems as well as resource boundaries on proper sharing arrangements is explored in various applications of the partnership solution that can consist of randomly assigning resource users to teams after everyharvesting round, having the same team members for several rounds or joining community members in partnerships."