<P> The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared - resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self - interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action . The concept and name originate in an essay written in 1833 by the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd , who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land ( then colloquially called `` the commons '' ) in the British Isles . The concept became widely known over a century later due to an article written by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 . In this context , commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere , oceans , rivers , fish stocks , or even an office refrigerator . </P>
<P> The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared - resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self - interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action . The concept and name originate in an essay written in 1833 by the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd , who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land ( then colloquially called `` the commons '' ) in the British Isles . The concept became widely known over a century later due to an article written by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 . In this context , commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere , oceans , rivers , fish stocks , or even an office refrigerator . </P>
the tragedy of the commons refers to the phenomenon where
the tragedy of the commons refers to the phenomenon where
a situation within a shared - resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self - interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action
a situation within a shared - resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self - interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action