Common Interest Tragedies

Managing tragedies: understanding conflict over common pool resources.

Conflicts over the management of common pool resources are not simply material. They also depend on the perceptions of the protagonists. Policy to improve management often assumes that problems are self-evident, but in fact careful and transparent consideration of the ways different stakeholders understand management problems is essential to effective dialogue.

Common interest

scientific and medical advice. That is what we are looking for from the work of this review group. " Barroso told EU leaders that food price rises had added " a new dimension " to the public debate about GM crops. He admitted people were worried about GM organisms in food and farming, but he said the EU was probably one of the biggest importers of GM feed as its livestock industry was highly de...

Communication and Common Interest

Explaining the maintenance of communicative behavior in the face of incentives to deceive, conceal information, or exaggerate is an important problem in behavioral biology. When the interests of agents diverge, some form of signal cost is often seen as essential to maintaining honesty. Here, novel computational methods are used to investigate the role of common interest between the sender and r...

Tragedies to Come

A book on the Mary Bell case acts, once again, as a depressing reminder that psychiatric facilities for children and adolescents are dangerously inadequate and that, until we devote enough resources and mobilise the right skills, further tragedies may still occur. Gitta Sereny's clear and readable book* will help many people, who had only the Press accounts to guide them, to make some sense of ...

The Tragedy of Tragedies