Tragedy of the Commons
A pattern (popularized by Garrett Hardin in 1968) in which a shared resource without clear property rights is over-exploited because each user gets the full benefit of their own consumption but bears only a fraction of the long-run depletion cost. Fisheries collapse, groundwater depletes, atmospheric carbon-absorption capacity gets overrun. The microeconomic fixes are either privatization (assign property rights — fishing quotas, water rights) or regulation, both of which create investable structural change.
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Related terms
Ambiguity Aversion · Anchored Assumption · Asset Beta · Bank ROE Spread · Banker Pitch Deck · Beta
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