7 ms·

Minimizing Defection Might Be the Solution to the Tragedy of the Commons

21 points by burtonator 7y ago

richk449 7y ago
Solving the tragedy of the commons. I wish you luck. Interestingly, you hint at, but don’t really acknowledge one of the classic solutions (typically pushed by the libertarians): privatize the commons. This is equivalent to your intuition of trying to set N=1. Of course, the other classic solution is regulation, which is not too far from your union example. Of course, both the classic solutions have downsides. Privatization makes it harder for everyone to share the good, and also leads over time to stratification and unequal society. Regulation means bureaucracy, which easily becomes captive to politics and money.
- lsc 7y ago
  so the non-libertarian answer to privatization of the commons is the pigovian tax. It's got most of the advantages (it uses the power of the market to maximize results per unit effort) and avoids some of the disadvantages inherent to privatizing things like air. Take, for example, the problem of limiting CO2 output. This is a global problem; there is no way to realistically privatize it. but, at least the people under the same treaty could tax the common forms of CO2 output. Charging per ton of CO2 output, many economists believe, is better than simply regulating how much CO2 a person can output because by giving it a dollar per tonne value, you are encouraging the market to eliminate CO2 output where it's cheapest and easiest to do so, while allowing the market to continue to output CO2 where it would be really expensive to avoid. 'cap and trade' is a variation on this that is similar but different; instead of setting the economic price of a tonne of carbon, for example, you set an absolute limit for how much carbon can be released, and then lets the market decide what to use that for.
  - radicalbyte 7y ago
    That's exactly why we need a CO2 tax now and why the current "right" (who have largely been captured by the fossil-fuel industries) are fighting it tooth and nail.
- chillacy 7y ago
  There are known “solutions” to the prisoners dilemma, which is the broader problem. (I say that in quotes because it always involves changing the problem in some way like adding a mafia Don or playing multiple rounds).
- xwvvvvwx 7y ago
  There are a wealth of real world examples of communities working together to collectively manage the commons without either privatisation or state regulation. If you want to know more you should familiarise yourself with the work of Elinor Ostrom.
  - richk449 7y ago
    That's great. If a group of people comes together to collectively manage a commons, that sounds like regulation to me. It's all semantics though.
    - matt9j 7y ago
      There is a subtle technical difference in the literature, where regulation is externally imposed and codified, while communal management is devised, enforced, and most importantly, flexibly changed by those actually involved with the appropriation and management of the resource.
      - richk449 7y ago
        Thanks. That makes sense.
- harimau777 7y ago
  It seems to me that the problem with the Libertarian approach is finding a just way to actually privatize the commons. Since they are by definition common property, the rich have no greater claim on them than the poor. In future generations it wouldn't be just that some people had access to the former commons and some people don't due to the actions of their ancestors. The only solution that I can see would be for those who own the commons to pay the profit that they gain from that ownership to those who do not own the commons. Which I guess is effectively Georgism.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Interestingly, you hint at, but don’t really acknowledge one of the classic solutions (typically pushed by the libertarians): privatize the commons. Then, as many countries have discovered, you have another problem...
yholio 7y ago
> What if we could solve this problem through core changes in our society? Yes, we call the necessary changes 'the state'. It's exactly to solve a collective action problem that the state first appears: military defense and preventing actual defection in war. Strong states prevent defection but then suffer from bad principal-agent problems, since rulers tend to advance their own goals - like waging war.
advanceduser 7y ago
Oh look, a justification for the Berlin Wall.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rossdavidh 7y ago
1) I find it amusing that an article regarding the supposed "Tragedy of the Commons" uses several Wikipedia quotes 2) The Tragedy of the Commons was thoroughly analyzed, with a great deal of empirical, historical data, by Elinor Ostrom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom Yes, one component of successful, long-lived common resources is related to group size. But you don't have to take my word for it, read her book, "Governing the Commons".
- Matticus_Rex 7y ago
  There's a huge tendency for smart people like computer scientists to think that, because they're smart, they can come up with "the solution" to systemic problem X without reading into the deep academic literature around it. I knew when I saw the title of the article on the front page that I (or someone) was going to need to preach the gospel of Ostrom in the comments.
  - dang 7y ago
    That tendency is universal. Perhaps CS and technical people are more likely to publish their thoughts in blog posts, but it's natural for everyone to talk about what they find interesting, experts or not, and we all underestimate what we don't know. This is how human conversation works, and it's arguably harmless—phrases like "shooting the shit" communicate this. I wonder if once a post shows up formally on something like HN's front page, we see it as implicitly claiming authority in a medium-is-the-message way, even if it all it's doing is thinking out loud. Then the article seems disappointing when it turns out just to be someone's notes on shit they were thinking about.
  - tchaffee 7y ago
    That's an unfair sweeping generalization about "smart people like computer scientists". Far more fair to say they enjoy thinking about, discussing, and attempting to solve problems. Trying to solve problems is a passion for all the good programmers I know. And predicting / guessing at solutions without having done the "deep academic literature" reading is actually an excellent learning technique that connects you more deeply to the reading if you decide to go down that path. Or do the predicting in a blog post and get free answers from the experts correcting you. I've "invented" a few things in my life only to later find the existing patents. I had so much fun doing it and learned so much, I'm glad I didn't know about the patents ahead of time.
jabl 7y ago
Anybody interested in "the commons" should familiarize herself with the work of Elinor Ostrom.
dvt 7y ago
There's been a trend lately of low-quality academic-lite blogposts being upvoted on HN. This, unfortunately, continues the pattern. I blame Wikipedia (and reddit-style intellectual superficiality); it's a double-edged sword that makes everyone think they're an expert. The Tragedy of the Commons is extensively studied in Game Theory (we spent half a semester on these types of problems) and has been at the heart of many social experiments over the past century (Ostrom was already cited a few times in the thread). Anyone that's done more than skim the Wikpedia article knows that group size is a primary element, but it's not the whole story. To say that the blog post brings nothing new to the table is an understatement. I really wish OP just gave a newbie-friendly introduction to the problem (which would seem more appropriate given their exposure), as opposed to proposing a "solution" -- the hubris is palpable. I mean, take a look at this quote: "Interestingly enough, the optimum solution is always present when N=1" -- it's wrong on just about every level. First, that's not a solution (and saying optimum is incredibly telling; the term of art is equilibrium, anyway), and second, common property (even if you're the only actor) is still not your property (think about a park in a city of population 1; there's a difference between that park and your back-yard). That's the whole point of the thought experiment.
- burtonator 7y ago
  Dude... I literally in the 3rd line said this: "I might be wrong but would love some feedback. It’s an exceedingly complicated topic which has been researched for hundreds of years so it might be that this observation has been made before." ... so there's to be NO discussion on the Internet of complicated topics. Got it!
  - dvt 7y ago
    > ... so there's to be NO discussion on the Internet of complicated topics. Got it! I think you're attacking a straw-man here. That's not what I said at all. I also write blog posts on complicated topics, but they are thoroughly researched and generally, though not always, within my purview of expertise. You literally only read the Wikipedia page.
    - 7y ago
CryptoPunk 7y ago
Unionization is a bad example. If all union members were unable to defect, the employer would still reject their demands for above market wages, because he could replace them wholesale with workers from the larger labor pool, at market rates. If all workers in the world were forcibly enrolled in a global union and prevented from defecting, and this union demanded a doubling of wages, this would just lead to 1. some companies shutting down, and 2. other companies seeing profit margins decline to below the rate that the supply of labor versus the supply of capital determines as optimal for economic development, resulting in more unemployed workers, and a one time boost in wages for employed workers, as labor's share of income increases, at the expense of lower recurring increases in wages, as the rate of economic growth declines. Anyway, smart contracts could indeed be a solution to defection. They are a potentially massively scalable coordination tool, allowing huge numbers of people to enter any given agreement at minimal cost.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
TomMckenny 7y ago
No doubt many specific problems could be addressed by work on the tragedy of the commons. But at the same time, theories around a healthy market _require_ defection in order to "guarantee" competition. So in its rawest form, we have an economic system that requires a system that is known to produce some bad outcomes (climate change) in order to avoid other bad outcomes (collusion). This poses large systemic challenge indeed.
- burtonator 7y ago
  I think the dichotomy between collusion and cooperation is a good one. I've been thinking about the Hong Kong protests a lot lately which is I think what spurred this post. I've been trying to rationalize defection as something inevitable and not just collusion. If it can be mathematically modeled then it's easier to think about rationally.
  - TomMckenny 7y ago
    I had always though the difference was an assertion of the speaker's values: HK protesters are cooperating to stand up for their rights vs The Phoebus cartel is colluding to the disadvantage of consumers. But maybe there is an objective detectable difference, perhaps related to defection reluctance. It would be great if there is some additional force at play that differentiates between them.
coldtea 7y ago
>Interestingly enough, the optimum solution is always present when N=1. If there’s just one actor (you) then you’re not likely to destroy your own property. Two objections: 1) Who said one person would necessarily understand it as "[his] own property"? Unless it is truly their property (e.g. their own house), it's conceivable that a single person could still consider the place they are in expendable (because e.g. they could move elsewhere, or they care more for short term profit for it and don't consider long term issues from their behavior). 2) Even worse, who said people respect their own property that much? People can't respect their own bodies (sedentary lifestyles, obesity, junk food, etc), their own families (domestic abuse, cheating, etc.), their own houses (tons of neglected, broken down houses), or even their personal lives (from alcoholism and drugs, to all kinds of subtler self-sabotage)...
apo 7y ago
Toward minimizing defection, the article offers these example solutions: > What if unions gave perks to employees including job references, health benefits, etc BUT to participate in the union you had to put forth a $5k bond. This could be deducted slowly over time from your paycheck. > ... > Consumers could do something similar for corporations as well. Have reserved payments given out over time but only if the companies don’t create any externalities for which the consumer doesn’t approve. There are multiple practical problems with these approaches, which might be grouped into two broad categories: 1. How do you prevent collusion? I defect and pay you to keep quiet. Or I pay you to falsely accuse another member of having defected. 2. What due process determines whether defection has occurred? In the constrained world of a system like Bitcoin, this can be easy, but only if the outside world doesn't enter. The minute we start invoking oracles to inject external state, then the entire system begins to revolve around how to prevent the same kinds of collusion/misrepresentation behaviors in the oracles.
rasengan0 7y ago
>If your company cares about the environment but all your customers care about is price then the companies that have a higher priced product will go out of business. I can picture Yvon Chouinard's middle finger slowly sticking up https://bcorporation.net/directory/patagonia-inc https://bcorporation.net/directory/patagonia-inc
ratel 7y ago
I have to agree with some of the commenters that your write-up is pretty bad, because far too general for such a well studied problem. Let me try to help you along in your thinking: The tragedy of the commons is not a generalized version of the prisoner dilemma. I guess you meant to say a prisoners dilemma is a more generalized version of the tragedy of the commons. This is however also not true. Logically because there is no sensible pay-off where everybody defects, but the other player. The commons would be largely destroyed way before everyone gets their pay-off so all the players would never collectively decide to do that (and decision is a integral part of the prisoners dilemma). You could make it into a NxN dimensional prisoners dilemma, but that is not useful for another reason. The tragedy of the commons is about future benefit (keeping the commons so everyone can extract more than they could individually at a single instance) a prisoners dilemma is an instant game. You could model the tragedy of the commons as a repeated prisoner dilemma. The problem is that free riding is not a rational option if you repeat it often enough. In the real world free-riding works, because we expect to play a limited number of rounds and in the long term we are all dead. The number of repetitions one expects to play is however not the same for all players. Limiting defection is in this case not external to the tragedy of the commons, as any way to resolve the prisoners dilemma is, because it reduces the pay-offs the participants get. Preventing defection costs and there is a balance to be struck to the costs to preventing an additional free-rider and letting him free-ride. There is also a moral component to this. Limiting defection means also being able to limit entry. The commons has de-facto become 'our commons'. There is the description of a 'mutual protective agency and one of the most common is the state.

21 points by burtonator 7y ago

Solving the tragedy of the commons. I wish you luck. Interestingly, you hint at, but don’t really acknowledge one of the classic solutions (typically pushed by the libertarians): privatize the commons. This is equivalent to your intuition of trying to set N=1. Of course, the other classic solution is regulation, which is not too far from your union example. Of course, both the classic solutions have downsides. Privatization makes it harder for everyone to share the good, and also leads over time to stratification and unequal society. Regulation means bureaucracy, which easily becomes captive to politics and money.

lsc 7y ago
so the non-libertarian answer to privatization of the commons is the pigovian tax. It's got most of the advantages (it uses the power of the market to maximize results per unit effort) and avoids some of the disadvantages inherent to privatizing things like air. Take, for example, the problem of limiting CO2 output. This is a global problem; there is no way to realistically privatize it. but, at least the people under the same treaty could tax the common forms of CO2 output. Charging per ton of CO2 output, many economists believe, is better than simply regulating how much CO2 a person can output because by giving it a dollar per tonne value, you are encouraging the market to eliminate CO2 output where it's cheapest and easiest to do so, while allowing the market to continue to output CO2 where it would be really expensive to avoid. 'cap and trade' is a variation on this that is similar but different; instead of setting the economic price of a tonne of carbon, for example, you set an absolute limit for how much carbon can be released, and then lets the market decide what to use that for.
- radicalbyte 7y ago
  That's exactly why we need a CO2 tax now and why the current "right" (who have largely been captured by the fossil-fuel industries) are fighting it tooth and nail.
chillacy 7y ago
There are known “solutions” to the prisoners dilemma, which is the broader problem. (I say that in quotes because it always involves changing the problem in some way like adding a mafia Don or playing multiple rounds).
xwvvvvwx 7y ago
There are a wealth of real world examples of communities working together to collectively manage the commons without either privatisation or state regulation. If you want to know more you should familiarise yourself with the work of Elinor Ostrom.
- richk449 7y ago
  That's great. If a group of people comes together to collectively manage a commons, that sounds like regulation to me. It's all semantics though.
  - matt9j 7y ago
    There is a subtle technical difference in the literature, where regulation is externally imposed and codified, while communal management is devised, enforced, and most importantly, flexibly changed by those actually involved with the appropriation and management of the resource.
    - richk449 7y ago
      Thanks. That makes sense.
harimau777 7y ago
It seems to me that the problem with the Libertarian approach is finding a just way to actually privatize the commons. Since they are by definition common property, the rich have no greater claim on them than the poor. In future generations it wouldn't be just that some people had access to the former commons and some people don't due to the actions of their ancestors. The only solution that I can see would be for those who own the commons to pay the profit that they gain from that ownership to those who do not own the commons. Which I guess is effectively Georgism.
coldtea 7y ago
>Interestingly, you hint at, but don’t really acknowledge one of the classic solutions (typically pushed by the libertarians): privatize the commons. Then, as many countries have discovered, you have another problem...

yholio 7y ago

> What if we could solve this problem through core changes in our society? Yes, we call the necessary changes 'the state'. It's exactly to solve a collective action problem that the state first appears: military defense and preventing actual defection in war. Strong states prevent defection but then suffer from bad principal-agent problems, since rulers tend to advance their own goals - like waging war.

advanceduser 7y ago

Oh look, a justification for the Berlin Wall.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

rossdavidh 7y ago

1) I find it amusing that an article regarding the supposed "Tragedy of the Commons" uses several Wikipedia quotes 2) The Tragedy of the Commons was thoroughly analyzed, with a great deal of empirical, historical data, by Elinor Ostrom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom Yes, one component of successful, long-lived common resources is related to group size. But you don't have to take my word for it, read her book, "Governing the Commons".

Matticus_Rex 7y ago
There's a huge tendency for smart people like computer scientists to think that, because they're smart, they can come up with "the solution" to systemic problem X without reading into the deep academic literature around it. I knew when I saw the title of the article on the front page that I (or someone) was going to need to preach the gospel of Ostrom in the comments.
- dang 7y ago
  That tendency is universal. Perhaps CS and technical people are more likely to publish their thoughts in blog posts, but it's natural for everyone to talk about what they find interesting, experts or not, and we all underestimate what we don't know. This is how human conversation works, and it's arguably harmless—phrases like "shooting the shit" communicate this. I wonder if once a post shows up formally on something like HN's front page, we see it as implicitly claiming authority in a medium-is-the-message way, even if it all it's doing is thinking out loud. Then the article seems disappointing when it turns out just to be someone's notes on shit they were thinking about.
- tchaffee 7y ago
  That's an unfair sweeping generalization about "smart people like computer scientists". Far more fair to say they enjoy thinking about, discussing, and attempting to solve problems. Trying to solve problems is a passion for all the good programmers I know. And predicting / guessing at solutions without having done the "deep academic literature" reading is actually an excellent learning technique that connects you more deeply to the reading if you decide to go down that path. Or do the predicting in a blog post and get free answers from the experts correcting you. I've "invented" a few things in my life only to later find the existing patents. I had so much fun doing it and learned so much, I'm glad I didn't know about the patents ahead of time.

jabl 7y ago

Anybody interested in "the commons" should familiarize herself with the work of Elinor Ostrom.

dvt 7y ago

There's been a trend lately of low-quality academic-lite blogposts being upvoted on HN. This, unfortunately, continues the pattern. I blame Wikipedia (and reddit-style intellectual superficiality); it's a double-edged sword that makes everyone think they're an expert. The Tragedy of the Commons is extensively studied in Game Theory (we spent half a semester on these types of problems) and has been at the heart of many social experiments over the past century (Ostrom was already cited a few times in the thread). Anyone that's done more than skim the Wikpedia article knows that group size is a primary element, but it's not the whole story. To say that the blog post brings nothing new to the table is an understatement. I really wish OP just gave a newbie-friendly introduction to the problem (which would seem more appropriate given their exposure), as opposed to proposing a "solution" -- the hubris is palpable. I mean, take a look at this quote: "Interestingly enough, the optimum solution is always present when N=1" -- it's wrong on just about every level. First, that's not a solution (and saying optimum is incredibly telling; the term of art is equilibrium, anyway), and second, common property (even if you're the only actor) is still not your property (think about a park in a city of population 1; there's a difference between that park and your back-yard). That's the whole point of the thought experiment.

burtonator 7y ago
Dude... I literally in the 3rd line said this: "I might be wrong but would love some feedback. It’s an exceedingly complicated topic which has been researched for hundreds of years so it might be that this observation has been made before." ... so there's to be NO discussion on the Internet of complicated topics. Got it!
- dvt 7y ago
  > ... so there's to be NO discussion on the Internet of complicated topics. Got it! I think you're attacking a straw-man here. That's not what I said at all. I also write blog posts on complicated topics, but they are thoroughly researched and generally, though not always, within my purview of expertise. You literally only read the Wikipedia page.
  - 7y ago

CryptoPunk 7y ago

Unionization is a bad example. If all union members were unable to defect, the employer would still reject their demands for above market wages, because he could replace them wholesale with workers from the larger labor pool, at market rates. If all workers in the world were forcibly enrolled in a global union and prevented from defecting, and this union demanded a doubling of wages, this would just lead to 1. some companies shutting down, and 2. other companies seeing profit margins decline to below the rate that the supply of labor versus the supply of capital determines as optimal for economic development, resulting in more unemployed workers, and a one time boost in wages for employed workers, as labor's share of income increases, at the expense of lower recurring increases in wages, as the rate of economic growth declines. Anyway, smart contracts could indeed be a solution to defection. They are a potentially massively scalable coordination tool, allowing huge numbers of people to enter any given agreement at minimal cost.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

TomMckenny 7y ago

No doubt many specific problems could be addressed by work on the tragedy of the commons. But at the same time, theories around a healthy market _require_ defection in order to "guarantee" competition. So in its rawest form, we have an economic system that requires a system that is known to produce some bad outcomes (climate change) in order to avoid other bad outcomes (collusion). This poses large systemic challenge indeed.

burtonator 7y ago
I think the dichotomy between collusion and cooperation is a good one. I've been thinking about the Hong Kong protests a lot lately which is I think what spurred this post. I've been trying to rationalize defection as something inevitable and not just collusion. If it can be mathematically modeled then it's easier to think about rationally.
- TomMckenny 7y ago
  I had always though the difference was an assertion of the speaker's values: HK protesters are cooperating to stand up for their rights vs The Phoebus cartel is colluding to the disadvantage of consumers. But maybe there is an objective detectable difference, perhaps related to defection reluctance. It would be great if there is some additional force at play that differentiates between them.

coldtea 7y ago

>Interestingly enough, the optimum solution is always present when N=1. If there’s just one actor (you) then you’re not likely to destroy your own property. Two objections: 1) Who said one person would necessarily understand it as "[his] own property"? Unless it is truly their property (e.g. their own house), it's conceivable that a single person could still consider the place they are in expendable (because e.g. they could move elsewhere, or they care more for short term profit for it and don't consider long term issues from their behavior). 2) Even worse, who said people respect their own property that much? People can't respect their own bodies (sedentary lifestyles, obesity, junk food, etc), their own families (domestic abuse, cheating, etc.), their own houses (tons of neglected, broken down houses), or even their personal lives (from alcoholism and drugs, to all kinds of subtler self-sabotage)...

apo 7y ago

Toward minimizing defection, the article offers these example solutions: > What if unions gave perks to employees including job references, health benefits, etc BUT to participate in the union you had to put forth a $5k bond. This could be deducted slowly over time from your paycheck. > ... > Consumers could do something similar for corporations as well. Have reserved payments given out over time but only if the companies don’t create any externalities for which the consumer doesn’t approve. There are multiple practical problems with these approaches, which might be grouped into two broad categories: 1. How do you prevent collusion? I defect and pay you to keep quiet. Or I pay you to falsely accuse another member of having defected. 2. What due process determines whether defection has occurred? In the constrained world of a system like Bitcoin, this can be easy, but only if the outside world doesn't enter. The minute we start invoking oracles to inject external state, then the entire system begins to revolve around how to prevent the same kinds of collusion/misrepresentation behaviors in the oracles.

rasengan0 7y ago

>If your company cares about the environment but all your customers care about is price then the companies that have a higher priced product will go out of business. I can picture Yvon Chouinard's middle finger slowly sticking up https://bcorporation.net/directory/patagonia-inc https://bcorporation.net/directory/patagonia-inc

ratel 7y ago

I have to agree with some of the commenters that your write-up is pretty bad, because far too general for such a well studied problem. Let me try to help you along in your thinking: The tragedy of the commons is not a generalized version of the prisoner dilemma. I guess you meant to say a prisoners dilemma is a more generalized version of the tragedy of the commons. This is however also not true. Logically because there is no sensible pay-off where everybody defects, but the other player. The commons would be largely destroyed way before everyone gets their pay-off so all the players would never collectively decide to do that (and decision is a integral part of the prisoners dilemma). You could make it into a NxN dimensional prisoners dilemma, but that is not useful for another reason. The tragedy of the commons is about future benefit (keeping the commons so everyone can extract more than they could individually at a single instance) a prisoners dilemma is an instant game. You could model the tragedy of the commons as a repeated prisoner dilemma. The problem is that free riding is not a rational option if you repeat it often enough. In the real world free-riding works, because we expect to play a limited number of rounds and in the long term we are all dead. The number of repetitions one expects to play is however not the same for all players. Limiting defection is in this case not external to the tragedy of the commons, as any way to resolve the prisoners dilemma is, because it reduces the pay-offs the participants get. Preventing defection costs and there is a balance to be struck to the costs to preventing an additional free-rider and letting him free-ride. There is also a moral component to this. Limiting defection means also being able to limit entry. The commons has de-facto become 'our commons'. There is the description of a 'mutual protective agency and one of the most common is the state.