Tragedy of the commons definition and example

• A. Tragedy of the commons occurs when a private owner overuses resources due to exclusive rights.
• B. Tragedy of the commons is a market failure due to perfect competition.
• C. Tragedy of the commons is overuse of a common resource due to lack of exclusive property rights; example: overfishing.
• D. Tragedy of the commons results from government ownership causing inefficiency.

Answer: (C)

The idea being tested is that shared resources tend to be overused when there are no exclusive property rights to restrict access. If no one owns the resource or has a strong incentive to limit use, each user benefits from taking more while the costs of overuse are spread among everyone. This leads to depletion of the resource—the tragedy.

Overfishing is a classic example: fishermen catch as many fish as possible because their individual benefit rises with each catch, but the long-term stock of fish falls, harming the whole community that depends on it. The other statements don’t fit this mechanism because private ownership would create incentives to conserve, the issue isn’t simply a feature of perfect competition, and government ownership isn’t the core explanation of why the resource is overused.