The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) exhibits a “tragedy” in this sense: if the players are fully informed and rational they are condemned to a jointly dispreferred outcome. In this essay I address the following question: What feature of the PD’s payoff structure is necessary and sufficient to produce the tragedy? In answering it I use the notion of a “trembling-hand equilibrium”. In the final section I...

The advanced technologies of the converged network are going to change the economic nature of the telecommunication network, especially the Internet. The Internet of today is an example of common resources and is suffering the tragedy of commons problem, i.e., it is overused. However, as the new network technologies of the converged network progress, the Internet will change from a common resou...

What are the differences between experiences that people consider spiritual and experiences that they consider enjoyable? Participants were asked to provide autobiographical narratives of either spiritual or enjoyable experiences, and the two types of narratives were compared. In Study 1 (n= 142), the differences between the narratives was established via judge-based thematic content analysis. ...

We study the effect of environmental risk on the extraction of a common resource. Using a dynamic and non-cooperative game in which an environmental event impacts the renewability and the quality of the resource, we show that the anticipation of such an event has an ambiguous effect on extraction and the tragedy of the commons. A risk of a reduction in the renewability induces the agents to ext...

In this paper I study a tragedy-of-the-commons model: a small open economy composed of different groups that compete for access to government resources and a government can save and borrow from risk-neutral foreigners. I show that the same economic forces that generate overspending in a tragedy-of-the-commons model can also guarantee that a small open economy repays its sovereign obligations. T...

The thalidomide tragedy in the late 1950s was a watershed moment for pharmaceutical regulation. New uses for this medication are being researched and implemented today. This article revisits the history of thalidomide and its consequences for regulation and for victims' rights in Brazil, based on a literature review, documentary analysis, and newspaper reports. The events highlighted herein sho...

The continuous integration development trend of China urban agglomerations will not only further promote economic development but also cause the loss of the natural buffer zone which could protect the regional environment, leading to the combined effects of environmental pollution. Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”, “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, Olson’s “Logic of Collective Action”, and other theoretic...

This paper develops mathematical models of the tragedy of the commons analogous to ecological models of resource consumption. Tragedies differ fundamentally from predator–prey relationships in nature because human consumers of a resource are rarely controlled solely by that resource. Tragedies do occur, however, at the level of the ecosystem, where multiple species interactions are involved. Hu...

Howmicromotives, the microstructural features of interactions, and macrobehavior are related is a fundamental question in all social sciences. In this article we argue that laboratory experiments are a useful tool to study this question, because the experimenter can measure motivations, manipulate microstructures, and sometimes even exploit variation in the macrosocial environment. We illustrat...

The wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo were perpretrated by a radical nationalist Serbian cultural political consciousness that the American cultural political consciousness and leadership had difficulty responding to and understanding. There is a great cultural divide between a 'pathology' in Serbian culture, Milosević's radical nationalism, and a humane 'naivete' in American cultural consciou...