Are All Commons Tragedies? The Case of Bison in the Nineteenth Century

摘要

The history of the American bison is one of rational individuals operating under an institutional framework that did not create a tragedy of the commons. It is true that property rights were not well defined and established for bison on the open prairies, but because bison were not a valuable resource, property-rights entrepreneurs put little effort into establishing rights for them. And even if there had been well-defined and enforced property rights, cattle would still have replaced bison as the primary converter of grass on the Great Plains. The adjustment from bison to cattle may not have been perfect, but there is no evidence of large-scale rent dissipation. When bison did become valuable as they came close to complete extermination, entrepreneurs established rights to live animals and prevented their complete demise. Thus, economists who wish to describe how rational individuals under an open-access resource will overuse that resource should turn to some other example than that of the American bison. And economists should recognize that other situations of rapid depletion of a resource do not necessarily represent the tragedy of the commons if the analysis has ignored important opportunity costs.