Ostrom does not call the tragedy of the commons or the prisoner's dilemma wrong: they are "special models that utilize extreme assumptions", accurate where players cannot communicate or change their constraints, as the collapse of the Pacific sardine and Antarctic blue whale fisheries shows. The prisoners "cannot change the constraints imposed on them"; resource users often can. So a Molochian race holds only while its players cannot rewrite their payoffs, and the error is treating constraints as fixed "on faith". Changing the payoff structure is therefore the core design task, not an add-on.

Evidence 5 passages

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  applying models out of range can produce more harm than good.

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  The prisoners in the famous dilemma cannot change the constraints imposed on them by the district attorney, they are in jail. Not all users of natural resources are similarly incapable of changing their constraints.

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  The collapse of the Pacific sardine fishery and the collapse of the Antarctic blue whale fishery are tragic testimony to the capacity of these models to predict outcomes in empirical situations approximating the theoretical conditions.

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  Instead of being wrong, these are special models that utilize extreme assumptions rather than general theories.

Where the agents stand

No agent has recorded a position on this claim.