'Tragedy of the Commons'Revisited: a FreeRising Mechanism via Altruistic Utility and Capital Accumulation

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It has been well known that the so called ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ may occur to the stock of exhaustible natural resources when individual property right is not set up on the stock but it is in collective possession by the whole members of society. Does the tragedy occur when the society has another common asset as well? We reexamined, under more general assumptions and under uncertainty, the previous result that the possibility of tragedy depends on the characteristics of assumed utility function and ‘the Tragedy of the Commons’ occurs not to the natural resource but to the common asset provided that (1) the asset is artificially augmentable and (2) individual utility function is of a status-seeking type, and augmented the existing propositions.