The Tragedy of the Commons in a Fishery when Relative Performance Matters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents a simple model of a common access fishery where fishermen care about relative performance as well as absolute profits. Our model captures the idea that status (which depends on relative performance) in a community influences a person's well-being. In our main specification, relative performance depends on the absolute difference in after-tax profits. We show that overharvesting resulting from the tragedy of the commons problem is exacerbated by the desire for higher relative performance, leading to a smaller steady-state fish stock and smaller steady-state profit for all the fishermen. We also consider alternative specifications where status depends on the absolute difference in harvests or relative difference in profits, or where there is heterogeneity in the degree to which status matters, or allowing for the possibility of extinction. In all these specifications, status further reduces the steady-state fish stock. We examine taxes and an individual quota as policy alternatives and find support for using the direct quantity method to implement the socially efficient stock level.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".