Competitive scenarios, community responses and organisational implications

Abstract

We analyze four scenarios commonly encountered in social processes undergoing competitive pressures: resource depletion by individuals acting greedily (‘tragedy of the commons’), wasted opportunity due to over protective players (‘tragedy of the anti-commons’), crowd following (‘majority wins’) and competition for niches (‘minority wins’). We show that these scenarios are extremes of a continuous resource exploitation problem and that complex and counter-intuitive behaviors are found at the transitions between ‘pure’ scenarios. We discuss the likely community behaviors and under what conditions a centralised management intervention may play a role in the resource and community resilience.

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