On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 10:55:01AM -0400, Phil Henshaw wrote: > > The canonical example is of a resource that begins with having no limit for > a small community of users with various cooperative habits for exploiting > it. If their habits constitute a growth system, the users will usually know > only their own individual experience and have no experiential information > about the approach of that limit. It's not clear what their best source of > information would be about it, or how they would choose what to do at the > limits. > > What kind of information might indicate the approach of common resource > limits? How would that be different from evidence that other users are > breaking their agreements? As independent users of natural resources tend > to have less information about, or interest in, each other's particular > needs than, say, cyclists in a peloton, how would they begin to renegotiate > their common habits when circumstances require it? > > Phil >
Interesting that you should have brought the tragedy of the commons into this. I recently read a paper by Juergen Kremer (http://www.rheinahrcampus.de/fileadmin/prof_seiten/kremer/MasterKeenEconomics.PDF) discussing some work that Steve Keen and I have done on the theory of the firm. In it, he mentions that our framework can be applied to the tragedy of the commons case, and that under the same special conditions of prefectly rational competitors and frictionless response, a cooperative solution will emerge that exploits the commons without overloading it. The paper is in German, but the idea is pretty simple once you understand our theory of the firm stuff, which you can get from my website. Of course, real economic agents are neither rational, nor frictionless, and in our Complex Systems '04 paper, we explore just how much irrationality and how much friction is required to break the Keen ("monopoly") solution (corresponding to the benevolent dictator ToC solution) into the Cournot ("competitive") solution (corresponding to over exploitation of the ToC). Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
