Commons can also be owned by a municipality or the state. These can include roads and paths, meadows, pastures and forests, or even lakes and streams or the village well. These goods may normally be used by any resident of the village or town. Use and access may be restricted by municipal regulations.

Public domain goods are similar. These are books, images, pieces of music or other items that anyone can use because they are not protected by copyright. However, this does not mean that the goods have no owner. For example, an image that can be used freely may still be owned by a person.

Advantages of commons

The use of shared resources to create a common good may make an investment possible in the first place. For example, digging and building a well was very costly and time-consuming, while its use was of little value to individuals. If a single person were to build a well, they would have to charge a fee for its use if the investment were to be economically viable. However, this would require someone to monitor the use of the well, which would lead to additional costs. The residents of the village, however, would only be partially willing to pay for its use and would probably prefer to draw water from a nearby stream, making the investment uneconomical due to a lack of revenue. If, on the other hand, the well was built jointly by everyone and was then freely available to all for water extraction, the investment would have been worthwhile.

When water is taken from a river to irrigate fields, this can lead to water shortages, meaning that other farmers have less water available and wells dry up. If a single person owns a river, they can exclude other people from using the water as they see fit in order to irrigate their own fields during dry periods and gain an economic advantage by selling food, or to assert other interests. Joint ownership can prevent this. If forests are owned by individuals, the inhabitants of a region may be excluded from hunting or logging. This was the case, for example, in the hunting grounds of princes and kings, which could have economic disadvantages for the rural population.

Problems of the commons

The problems of the commons are also addressed in game theory. Here, the problems associated with a lack of responsibility for public goods and the overuse of goods are analysed.

A central problem of the commons is the lack of responsibility or overly general responsibility. If there is no owner of a good, there is also no one responsible for investing in it, repairing it or cleaning it. In the case of forests, lakes or the seas, this can result in environmental pollution in the form of rubbish that is not removed. In the case of a road that was built in the past, for example, there is a lack of investment in repairing potholes or broken road markings. Even if a community is the owner, other issues may take precedence and the common property deteriorates over time and is destroyed.

With many public goods, it is difficult to limit their use and exclude users. This leads to overuse. Examples include overfishing of the oceans or lakes, discharge of wastewater into streams and rivers, and overuse of soil, resulting in desertification. Traffic jams on the roads can also be a consequence of overuse.

One solution to the problem is often the enforcement of rules to conserve resources through government supervision or agreements between the parties concerned. One example is the European Union's fishing quotas to conserve fish stocks in the North Sea and Baltic Sea. Such agreements are effective when they are decided upon in a joint association, such as the EU, or when a small group of stakeholders would suffer great damage if there were no agreement. This is where the prisoner's dilemma considered in game theory comes into play.

---

Legal notice - Privacy policy