ABSTRACT
The essays in this book illustrate what I call the “tragedy of free for all fishing.” As most readers of this book may be aware, Hardin (1968) made the term “tragedy of the commons” popular, but a close reading of his seminal paper reveals that what he was actually concerned about is the “tragedy of free for all,” where a commonly shared resource is accessed by many without effective regulation (e.g. Hawkshaw et al., 2012). The essays in this book demonstrate, through the application of game theory, that even fish stocks that are owned commonly by a number of agents (e.g. two countries) can be managed to avoid the “tragedy of the commons” by putting in place an effective cooperative management regime — a point that was demonstrated by Nobel Laureate Ostrom (1990) and her collaborators more generally.
