The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource

Gordon, H. S. (1954). The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery. Journal of Political Economy, 62(2), 124-142.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1954

DOI

10.1086/257497

Link

https://doi.org/10.1086/257497

Cited from

economics_finance, operations_research

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Resource Management
  • In ecology and natural resource management: forest rotation ages (balancing growth vs. harvest), fishery quotas and Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), water-rights regimes (riparian vs. appropriative allocation), carrying capacity (sustainable yield), species management (habitat allocation, breeding seasons) — Gordon (1954) gave the first formal economic model of common-property fisheries, establishing why open access produces overexploitation absent allocation rules.
• Strategic Substitute
  • Public-goods provision: every additional contributor reduces the marginal value of my own contribution; free-riding is substitutability at the welfare layer. Conservation and fisheries: when other boats fish hard, the residual stock available to me drops, and my optimal effort can rise (race to fish) or fall (give up the day) depending on cost structure.

    This sourceFoundational analysis of open-access fisheries in which others' effort depletes the residual stock, shaping each actor's optimal effort — a strategic-substitution structure over a shared resource.

• Tragedy of the Commons
  • … the underlying dynamic had been analyzed much earlier by William Forster Lloyd in his 1833 Oxford lecture "Two Lectures on the Checks to Population" (which Hardin himself cited), by classical economists treating externality and common-property problems, by H. Scott Gordon's 1954 analysis of open-access fisheries
• War Of Attrition
  • The evolutionary-stable-strategy analysis of animal displays ports to market-exit analysis; auction theory's insight that all-pay equilibria dissipate the prize ports to fee-shifting law reform; the political-science framing of brinkmanship as an attrition contest ports to online-platform design, where edit-war locking, cooldown periods, and reply rate limits all convert open-ended attrition into bounded or deadlined contests; and military doctrine about attrition warfare ports to resource-extraction policy, where a poorly designed open-access fishery is a war of attrition over the stock with predictable dissipation of the resource rent.

    This sourceOpen-access fishery as a dissipative competition over the stock, with rent dissipated through unrestricted entry — the resource-extraction analogue of attrition.

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