Tragedy of the Commons
A situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource through their collective action.
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Origin
Formalized by ecologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 paper in Science. His thought experiment: herders sharing common grazing land each have incentive to add one more animal, but collectively they overgraze and destroy the resource. The metaphor has been applied to fisheries, pollution, and climate change. Economist Elinor Ostrom later showed that communities often self-govern commons successfully without privatization or regulation.
Updated February 22, 2026