Wikipedia and the Tragedy of the Commons
The tragedy of the commons presents the importance of property rights. However, this article discusses the example of Wikipedia that contradicts the idea from the tragedy of the commons. The article starts by addressing the general case of public goods that people are interested in using, and people volunteer to contribute to the production of those public goods. It seems that the public good will not be provided, because a self-interested individual would not choose to contribute in order to maximize his or her payoff. This reasoning does not hold for Wikipedia. Though the website runs on private donations and public contribution of the contents, it remains to be a widely used and relatively credible resource – if the tragedy of the commons applies to Wikipedia, it should have been already shut down.
This notion of contribution can be nicely mapped to the model we had in class, with the notion of revenue of raising cows on the village commons. The existence of Wikipedia is the total revenue. The payoff each person gets maps to revenue per cow. The contribution people made is the price they need to pay to use the common property. If one can choose whether to pay for the usage of the commons, one is more likely not paying anything, so that one’s payoff can be c-x, rather than c-x-p.
The case of Wikipedia contradicts to our statement in class that without property rights, the incentive to create the resource will be largely reduced and the intellectual product might not exist. As far as I am concerned, one possible explanation for this can be Wikipedia emphasizes the importance of donation so that people are more aware that if they do not contribute, the website will go down. Also, the donation needed for each person is much smaller compared to the value they get from the website. These two points are supported by the survey cited in the article, which shows that the first two reasons for donating to Wikipedia are “small donation is welcomed,” and “saw an appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales”.
Sources:
http://themarketmogul.com/wikipedia-another-answer-tragedy-commons/