Tragedy of the Commons

The Tragedy of the Commons is a type of social trap, often economic, that involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. The "Tragedy of the Commons" is a structural relationship between free access to, and unrestricted demand for a finite resource. The term derives originally from a comparison noticed by William Forster Lloyd with medieval village land holding in his 1833 book on population. It was then popularized and extended by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons." However, the theory itself is as old as Thucydides and Aristotle, the latter of whom said "that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."
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