Principles of Microeconomics / Unit 12 MIC 1116 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Remedies for the Commons
Captions available
The idea
Remedies restrict access or create ownership: licenses, harvest limits, seasons, catch shares dividing a total allowable catch, or bans. Ostrom showed that users near a shared resource can manage it by their own rules.
In practice
Cattle, privately owned, multiplied; buffalo, owned by nobody, nearly vanished.
Where people slip
Both positions are attributed; which prevails depends on whether users can see and sanction each other.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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