Rethinking the Tragedy of the Commons: The Integration of Socio-Psychological Dispositions

In current research there is increasing evidence on why and how common-pool resources are successfully, i.e. sustainably, managed without the force of (often unsuccessful) top-level policy regulations. G. Hardin argued in 1968 in his Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin 1968) that commons must become depleted if users are free to choose extraction and resource use levels. In this study, we propose that socio-psychological factors can explain the success of resource use of a common without any top-level regulations. We exemplify this behavior by a spatio-temporally dynamic agent-based model of the Tragedy of the Commons using behavioral game theory and Nash equilibria calculation. By providing a spatio-temporal representation of Hardin's dilemma, the model could verify his argument in a temporal way if socio-psychological influence is disregarded, and indicated that under its influence the common can be sustained. We illustrated how dispositions such as cooperativeness, positive reciprocity, fairness towards others, and risk aversion broadly can support sustainable use, while negative reciprocity, fairness towards oneself, and conformity can inhibit it. Though, we also showed that it would be dangerous to generalize this kind of behavior, as changes in one of these dispositions can result in opposite system behavior, in dependence on the other dispositions. Due to this general capacity to account for such complex behavior that real common-pool system usually exhibit, and its ability to model intermediate equilibria, the proposed modelling approach, i.e. combining game-theory solution concepts with agent-based modelling, may be worth an assessment of its capacity to model empirical phenomena.