Historically, common property is one of the dominant forms of ownership through which natural resources—e.g., forests, pastures, and fisheries—are managed. However, their decline across societies due to marketization and privatization has prompted intense debates. This Article seeks to...

Humanity's problem with climate change has been likened to a "tragedy of the commons". If the atmosphere is seen as an open access dump for gasses like CO2 or methane, Garret Hardin's conclusion from 1968: "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all" is obviously correct. But how do we create a...

The inter-temporal resource allocation efficiency of a rights-based common-pool resource management system is threatened by a stock externality when one user’s extraction lowers the resource stock and raises the extraction cost for others. This paper proposes a novel decentralized rights-based...

Incomplete property rights are common across a range of natural resources such as fisheries and groundwater. The High Plains Aquifer region of Kansas provides one example of a complex but incomplete system of property rights. Rights to groundwater in Kansas are incomplete due to the physical...

From public lands to beaches and to data, our society is rich with resources purposefully kept in the public domain. Common resources provide profound economic, social, and democratic value to individuals, communities, and society as a whole. These, however, depend on the public’s ability to...

This study investigates the roles of informal gatekeepers in the context of First Nations health care in Canada. While existing literature focuses on gatekeeping by professionals, such as corporate board members, auditors, general practitioners, and specialists, we present empirical evidence on...

In commercial fisheries, the fishing decisions of a vessel are never really independent of the other vessels' decisions. Congestive externalities on fishing sites impact a vessel's behavior and create additional operation costs, while short-term stock effects, whereby fish stocks are locally...

The inefficiencies of common property fisheries are well-known to economists. To avoid over-exploitation, they propose multiple forms of government solution such as taxes, quotas and the enforcement of property rights regimes designed to avoid over-harvesting. But can efficient arrangements also...

The Commons' explores the many forms of development being championed by Africa's residents, users, and citizens. In addition to managing property and shared tangible and intangible resources collectively, communities are experimenting with a concept of 'commoning' founded on values such as...

We study quantity and price competition in heterogeneous triopoly markets where two firms are commonly owned by institutional shareholders, whereas the third firm is owned by independent shareholders. With such a mixed ownership structure, the common owners have an incentive to coordinate their...

Most studies on common-pool resource usage focus on situations in which actors are in symmetric positions when they use the resource. Many real-world cases do not fit this scenario because users are in asymmetric positions regarding their ability to benefit from the resource. Examples range from...

In this paper, we propose an evaluative framework to analyse Commons governance situations that use blockchain-based governance tools. Our research builds on a relatively recent field of literature linking the work of Elinor Ostrom and blockchain-based governance and unifies different strands to...

The National Park Service and other agencies have argued that our recreation lands face a crisis of deferred maintenance. This paper evaluates two proposals for funding public lands, increasing gate fees and taxing recreational gear. It analyzes the joint welfare effects of such taxes and the...

Commons governance is complex and polycentric, involving a range of actors, working at different scales with different concepts of ‘development’, and different types of power. Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) have generated considerable attention as a way to address these tensions among...

American local governments own and manage a wide portfolio of enterprises, including gas and electricity companies, water systems, subways, bus systems and schools. Existing theories of public ownership, including the presence of natural monopolies, can explain much of the observed municipal...

Common resources may be managed with inefficient policies for the sake of equity. We study how rationing the commons shapes the efficiency and equity of resource use, in the context of agricultural groundwater use in Rajasthan, India. We find that rationing binds on input use, such that farmers,...

This paper studies why scientific forecasts regarding exceptional or rare events generally fail to trigger adequate public response. A major example is climate change: despite years of scientific reporting, public acceptance of economic regulations is still limited. Building on the main causes...

Natural Resource Management is affected the by the varied roles of institutions, and importantly, by the process of decentralization which has been adopted by many developing countries like Bangladesh, where the existing resource management system is complex and politicized. This study...

We examine a game of harvesting a renewable common resource and investigate the ramifications of competition. We formulate the problem as an impulse control game between two competing harvesters and devise a new formulation of closed-loop impulse control strategies. In the case of non-zero setup...

The story of mining is the story of civilization. From the development of metal currency and rudimentary tools through the extraction of fossil fuels and rare earth minerals necessary for renewable energy technology, mining is fundamental to human advancement. American civilization is no...

I propose a novel channel of international risk sharing: the common currency channel. I theoretically show how the central bank of a currency union can use the common currency to insure member countries against consumption risk from idiosyncratic productivity shocks. A trade-off between risk...

Existing models of open-access resources are applicable to non-storable resources, such as fish. Many open-access resources, however, are used to produce storable goods. Elephants, rhinos, and tigers are three prominent examples. Anticipated future scarcity of these resources will increase...

We study potential drivers for a large cross-section of commodity futures. Unlike previous studies, we examine the effect of monthly drivers on daily returns using mixed-frequency Granger causality tests. We find real economic activity as a main driver on a monthly basis, whereas financial...

Addressing the shortcomings of the Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCMs), a nascent blockchain industry has disrupted this area with an ever-growing number of projects leveraging open-source, decentralised base-layer platforms (i.e. Ethereum, Cosmos) and business-oriented decentralized applications...

Usually, economic research on collusion looks at the firms and how they optimally behave. The complex situation in which involved agents of the firms find themselves tends to be overly simplified or overlooked. This exploratory paper looks through the lens of the `governance of the commons' to...

I propose a novel channel of international risk sharing: the common currency channel. I theoretically show how the central bank of a currency union can use the common currency to insure member countries against consumption risk from idiosyncratic productivity shocks. A trade-off between risk...

The fishery activity contributes greatly to value added, labour creation and poverty reduction. Nevertheless, many fish stocks have been collapsing due to overfishing and governance inefficiency. In Morocco, in addition to its fragility and instability, the stock of octopus for example has not...

Common pool resources (CPRs) are usually exploited one generation after another meaning that there is an intergenerational link between consumers. This key dimension is often not considered in theoretical or field experiments, due to the difficultly in approaching it. We overcome this barrier by...

Vor dem Hintergrund stark steigender Boden- und Wohnraumpreise in attraktiven deutschen Großstädten werden seit einigen Jahren intensive Debatten über die Eigentumsverhältnisse an innerstädtischen Grundstücken geführt. Zunehmend mehr Gehör konnten sich zuletzt jene Stimmen verschaffen,...

Google, iPhones, the national power grid, surgical operating rooms, baby monitors, surveillance technology, and wastewater management systems all run on open-source software. Open-source software, or software that is free and publicly available, powers our day-to-day lives. As a resource, it...

In "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin argues that those who can use a resource for free consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. Public resources eventually collapse because people overuse them. Hardin’s widely accepted argument seems correct as far as it goes,...

We test whether the decisions in a common-pool resource game are better modeled game- theoretically as strategic substitutes or complements using an individual-level dataset of groundwater usage that accounts for 3% of US irrigated agriculture. Based on a regression framework with instrumental...