An unexpected discovery : Johann Heinrich von Thuenen and the tragedy of the commons

William Forster Lloyd's 1833 sketch about poor cattle on the commons and the well-fed animals on the adjacent enclosures published in his "Two lectures on the checks to population" has hitherto been assessed as one starting point of the economics of renewable resources. In the 20th century the question of the use of common property resources has initially been treated by fisheries economists, at first in unknown publications of Jens Warming in 1911 and 1931, and after a disruption of more than 40 years starting again with the contributions of Gordon and Scott in the 1950s. Important results have been the derivation and presentation of the economic criteria for the open access equilibrium case on the one hand and the private property equilibrium case on the other hand. Garrett Hardin's well known 1968 Sciences article brought a new title and increased awareness to the "tragedy of the commons" and Elenor Ostrom's 2009 nobel prize in economics finally underlined the importance as well as the diversity of institutional rules to achieve an efficient use of the natural resources - challenging the favored liberal concept of a privatization of scarce resources. ...