The Tragedy of the Commons and of a Distorted Compliance

Opinion Policy Analysis by Gaelle Nohra, Staff Writer

March 4th, 2021

The Tragedy of the Commons is a problem in economics where individuals consume a shared resource with self-centered attitudes at the expense of others’ well-being. It also postulates some of the reasons why consumers act the way they do. For instance, the reason why individuals rush to book a ticket for their favorite artist’s concert before it’s sold out, or why college students ask their mates to book a class on their behalf in situations when they’re not able or allowed to. This article will attempt to explain the reason behind New Zealand’s success at containing the virus in terms of this theory and the role played by closure. 

To better understand the theory’s essence, consider a village where one water pool is at the disposal of everyone to get water and supply their daily needs. The pool gets filled on a weekly basis and as soon as the filling process is done, some consumers rush to get a share far higher than their actual need, leaving none to the rest of villagers. In an optimal world, consumers would respect the need of their neighbors by sharing the resource equally. While the reward received by each will be much smaller, cooperation and compliance in that case will pave the way for other positive features to arise, mainly summarized by the trust and reliance developed among village members. But that remains an overly-optimistic scenario with a degree of occurrence being a function of multiple factors, including the number of villagers. 

But why is the number is important?

As a matter of fact, Marwell Gerald and Schmitt David R observed that in 3-person versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a standard experiment used in Game Theory[i] that serves to explain the settings under which individuals cooperate or defect, players were substantially less cooperative than in 2-person game versions,[ii] meaning that in larger circles, cooperation and compliance are hardly sustainable. Indeed, this finding aligns with the concept that “too many chefs spoil the soup”. In large groups, inconveniences result not just from the fact that the resource, the good or the service in question is non-excludable and open to everyone, but that many others share the approximate need of consuming it, in a quasi-similar amount and way of leading. 

The Tragedy of the Commons – and Covid-19

The ongoing health crisis, having exploded in 2020, turned our planet into a bigger village where abiding by lockdown guidelines constitutes the neo-cooperative conduct by which one protects himself and his surroundings. Aside from fast transmission and asymptomatic cases, containing the virus could be partially achieved by ensuring that each country, excludes itself from the rest of the world so that its social distancing measures operate at maximum efficiency, in the sense that its population’s compliance does not get hurt by another’s disobedience.

Now it could be said that the failure of achieving an immediate containment of Covid-19 in some countries is attributed to their respective population size, however in the case of New Zealand, it gets clearer that it is not only a matter of size but how internally compliant individuals within the same circle are acting. The combination of the measures undertaken by the country ranging from the launch of its four-stage alert system based on continuous risk assessment, to the extensive testing in place, to the complete closure of borders for all non-citizens and residents, have led citizens to exhibit parallel adherence, and thus leading the country to lift all Covid restrictions. Much of these words delineate the dimension where The Tragedy of the Commons elucidates the conditions under which lockdowns achieve optimal effectiveness: closure. On a game level, closure entails preventing new players from coming in as they might threaten the level of compliance adhered to by existing ones. In the village example, if villagers agree among themselves to proportionately extract and distribute water, they will hesitate to welcome new villagers. First and foremost, this can be seen as a result of the lack of information regarding the individual’s willingness to cooperate. Secondly, why take the risk?  On a country level, closure analogously entails the complete shutdown of borders, the implementation of lockdown measures within one delimited territory and the prohibition of new entrances.  

In a scenario where new joiners are permitted to enter, compliance is distorted. We can see this occurrence clearly within the British case. Ever since the outbreak, the UK never endeavored a complete closure, thinking it would have a negligible impact at the time where community transmission was significantly present. Prof Michael Baker, one of New Zealand’s top epidemiologist, emphasized the flaw of this strategy “[by doing] the British thing - waiting too long and keeping open too long - it balloons and becomes a major problem, which is costly on both economic and health fronts”[iii]. This isn’t to deny the logistical complexity coming from country closure, rather than to accentuate that. Similarly, in The Tragedy of the Commons, compliers need to get rid of the non-complier in order not to be wronged. In the covid-19 scene, the effectiveness of distancing measures heavily rely on the population’s ability to maintain the same level of cooperation and compliance. 

[i] Theoretical framework belonging to the field of Behavioral Economics, whereby the decision-making of individuals involved in a certain setting is analyzed and defined in its optimal state. 

[ii] Cooperation in a three-person Prisoner’s Dilemma, by Marwell Gerald and Schmitt David R., 1972, retrieved from https://content.apa.org/record/1972-22889-001

[iii] How did New Zealand become covid-19 free? By Anna Jones, BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53274085