Commons and anti-commons? Tragedies mixed for a happy ending

Just got time to read an old article: Buchanan and Yoon's Symmetric Tragedies: commons and anticommons. Yes they demonstrated the apparent symmetry between the outcomes of the two kinds of tragedies, though I don't see the mechanistic symmetry yet.

There is actually an application of both patterns already, where the two opposite tragedies were mixed so that they canceled each other. The case is the well known solution of the the common pool over-use problem by Elinor Ostrom (see relevant description at Wikipedia).

I heard Ostrom's solution only yesterday from a friend. To me that solution sounds so brutal but so nimble. There are two most impressive things in her 8-principle solution.

The first is the trimming of reality to fit the model. One often finds that their models far away from reality because the processes are over simplified. Usually we try to add more parameters into our models to make them closer to reality, or at least make a compromise between the simplicity and reliability. However, Ostrom chose a totally different way, by changing the reality and making it meet the simplicity in the model.

The second thing is that Ostrom actually borrowed some components from the anti-commons tragedy, used them to cancel the effects of commons' tragedy in that case. Look at her principles 3 and 5:

 3. Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;

 5. A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;

Are they familiar to you who know well about anti-commons tragedy? The two principles in effect embodied an 'exclusion right' entitled to all the individual players, i.e. every member of that community has some right to restrain other members from utilizing the resources. Thus people in this case compete with each other not only by utilizing the resources, but also by implementing their exclusion right, which is the key component of an anti-commons tragedy.

And we know, players in a setting of commons tragedy tend to over-utilize the resources while in an anti-commons tragedy setting they tend to under-utilize the resources. It is thus understandable that when both settings come into effect, the use of resources may be at an intermediate level, perhaps close to the optimal level in terms of the community's collective interest.

But does this new level appear to be an attractor state? We need to construct a model to simulate the case, and find different conditions where the solution works or doesn't work.

Two symmetric opposite tragedies can both appear in a single case and cancel each other, which is an interesting point learned from Ostrom's solutions. I look forward to more applications of this tact into solving more problems of either type of tragedies.