摘要
解决公共品问题，不是只能在市场与政府之间选择。在两者之外，还有一个解决办法：自我治理。
Elinor Ostrom, Co-Director of Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. As the first woman to receive this award, Professor Ostrom was praised for her study in the economic governance of the commons. In China, media often take 'the commons' as 'the common people' while ignoring a concept tightly related to this theory, the tragedy of the commons. In his influential paper, 'The Tragedy of the Commons,' Garrett Hardin argued that there are situations in which multiple individuals, who act independently and who solely and rationally consult their self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen. This has troubled generations of economists, including Garrett himself. Welfare economics suggests that a government’s mandatory measures, such as quotas and tariffs, can combat the tragedy. Professor Ostrom found another way to analyze the issue: people can develop diverse institutional arrangements to manage the shared resources by themselves. This has revealed a perpetual flaw in economics: people are social animals, and not merely calculators of their own individual expediencies.
