Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Managing a Commons (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Managing a Commons (2011)

onthecommons.org

58 pointsevilsimon15 comments

> Ostrom’s achievement effectively answers popular theories about the “Tragedy of the Commons”, which has been interpreted to mean that private property is the only means of protecting finite resources from ruin or depletion.

I found this a weird characterization of the Tragedy of the Commons. My sense of TooC has always been that it's an effective refutation to the belief that the Nash equilibrium is best for everyone. With some first-year calculus you can prove that a regulated global optimum creates a greater individual payoff over time than a Nash equilibrium. That's the opposite of the above characterization.

> refutation to the belief that the Nash equilibrium is best for everyone

That's not the claim of the Nash equilibrium. The idea behind a Nash equilibrium is that there's no better -- not best -- strategy for anyone (if all strategies are known). You can trivially build a game where outcomes are pretty awful for somebody -- or everybody -- but not as awful as changing strategies. The Tragedy of the Commons isn't really game-theoretic (or a Nash equilibrium, for that matter[1]), but rather regarded as a public policy thought experiment. Ostrom's discussion on the Tragedy is from this latter point of view.

[1] http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/09/18/the-tragedy-of-...

I don't mean that it's the claim of the Nash equilibrium itself, I'm referring to the common belief that self-interest alone is a functional guiding principle. Objectivists, some libertarians, etc.

I take the Nash equilibrium to mean that everyone knows everyone else's strategy and no one has individual incentive to change. But when that balance is reached, there can still exist superior choices that require coordination where the result will still yield better individual payoffs for everyone. So that's a refutation of the notion that self-interest is king.

That point can always be contested by dickering with the definition of self-interest, for instance by saying it's by definition in someone's self-interest to coordinate, but that's about where the usefulness of the discussion falls apart. It really just comes down to how many externalities you want to bring in to your mental model.

I've been wondering - what happens if you consider a market as a form of commons that companies need to take care of in the same way (or suffer the same tragedy)?

The examples that come to mind are telecoms in rural areas (what with all the town stepping in to do it themselves) and healthcare (what with the general sentiment (AFAIK) that the status quo (in the US) isn't working).

Telecoms in rural areas seems like the opposite problem: nobody wants to exploit that market, due to very high costs.

Healthcare in the US, on the other hand, is such a morass of regulations (including patents), subsidization programs and conflicting interests that I can't see it fit any simple model.

> Healthcare in the US, on the other hand, is such a morass of regulations (including patents), subsidization programs and conflicting interests that I can't see it fit any simple model.

This is a very good points. Some of these programs are just so huge and so complex, its crazy. We are talking about almost 20% of GDP that is regulated in a incredibly complex ways, has massive amount of government money spent on it as well.

I found this remarkably refreshing, although as yet my knowledge of her writing is still zero. Any good references, articles books etc, other than the ones mentioned in the article.

Does it strike anyone else that the model of an internet commons is worth exploring? Is reddit for example a kind of commons? Sharing resources, like a field for cows (aka the Boston Commons) is one kind of physical commons, but isn't the internet another?

That is an uncommmon spelling there in the title

It does add an uncommmon asymmmetry.

Ah thanks! Fixeddd.

HN is a commons, and follows few/none of these principles. This comment, for example, could ungenerously be considered "low effort", but that's because it's easy to dismiss a comment with few characters, so making sure the number of characters written in a comment is long enough to match the magical "not low effort" value that's applied (unevenly, to be clear).

Even trying to talk about this problem leads to censorship on this site.

Even trying to talk about this problem leads to censorship on this site

Trying to bypass filters in noise and tone does incur downvoting, yes. I've been guilty of the offence and of the downvoting. Part of policing the commons is that some things people want to do in the commons are low damage but not no damage: we forbid murder but we also make you pick up your litter kind of costs. Is all litter picked up? No. But, most is, and very little murder goes unnoticed on HN

The problem with “managing” a commons is the principal-agent problem — that the people you appoint to do the management will often wind up making or interpreting the rules in a way that benefits themselves.

I don’t see much in these principles to overcome that problem — the principles seem to be written on the assumption that you are the manager and that you are perfectly virtuous and want what’s best for everybody.

Divvying commons into private property has the underrated advantage that it requires less ongoing management so it has fewer opportunities for corruption.

Her work absolutely addresses principal-agent problems. In fact that is the core of her work.

This is on private goods.

We are it people and we are dealing mostly with public free good. The case is quite different. The game and rule are different.

Actually the whole world have been prospered not because better handling of private common good. We are not. Look at ocean look at pollution look at earth warming up. Who watch the watcher. Global common good is the problem. E might die as a species because of that ultimately. My thesis supervisor is her student I think is PhD is on Nepal navigation.

But we are better handle one public good - free information and its flow. F=ma is a free public good. You can spread it without consuming it. That is the main reason why western world take over chinese due to the free flow of info.

Unlike fish. Or fresh air. Our global warming. Game theory is not that useful. Coarse theory used in carbon tax is one of the innovation. Need more.

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