College of Business Administration

Social Responsibility:

The Legal and Ethical Environment of Business

Commons Game

The commons game is based upon the situation outlined in Garret Hardin's influential essay, The Tragedy of the Commons. The class will share a common resource, from which each group may extract a 'harvest' during each round of the game. The self-regenerating resource in this simulation is, of course, much simpler than natural systems...but the fundamental structure holds.

What you do know:

*The resource regenerates itself after each harvest, unless it is completely depleted.
*The extent to which the resource is regenerated during each iteration is determined by the amount of the resource that is left after each harvest
*The game mirrors a biological system in that at very low resource levels the resource is replenished at a very slow rate, while at levels approaching maximum capacity the regenerative rate is similarly slow.
*The resource's `ecosystem' has a maximum carrying capacity
*The ecosystem is not at capacity at the start of the game; furthermore, the starting value is somewhere in the range of maximum regeneration

What you do not know:

*The carrying capacity of the system
*The rate at which the commons is regenerated

What has been decided:

*Each group has the right/responsibility to decide how much to extract--or return--at each round (maximum harvest is equal to the resource pool size divided by the number of players in the game; maximum return is equal to the amount extracted in the immediately preceding round)
*Voting will be accomplished by secret ballot

Other than these few guidelines, there are no rules for the commons game...

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