<P> The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared - resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self - interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action . The concept and name originate in an essay written in 1833 by the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (then colloquially called "the commons") in the British Isles . The concept became widely known over a century later due to an article written by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 . In this context, commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator . </P> <P> It has been argued that the very term' tragedy of the commons' is a misnomer per se, since' the commons' originally referred to a resource owned by a community, and no individual outside the community had any access to the resource . However, the term is presently used when describing a problem where all individuals have equal and open access to a resource . Hence,' tragedy of open access regimes' or simply' the open access problem' are more apt terms . </P>

The tragedy of the commons refers to the phenomenon where