The Tradeoff of the Commons

Randolph McAfee and Alan Miller

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We develop a model of scarce, renewable resources to study the commons problem. We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, property rights can often be less efficient than a commons. In particular, we study two effects: (1) waste which arises when individuals expend resources to use a resource unavailable due to congestion and (2) the risk of underutilization of the resource. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for each effect to dominate the other when the cost of determining the availability of a resource is low.

Keywords: Tragedy of the Commons; Spectrum; Open Access; Appointments; Property Rights; Reservations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 D45 K23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-11-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/26423/1/MPRA_paper_26423.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/26560/1/MPRA_paper_26560.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The tradeoff of the commons (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:26423

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).