Nobel Prize for sustainable use of resources

摘要

One of the joint winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Economics is a political scientist who has specialised in finding alternative ways of regulating shared resources such as water supplies.rnIn naming Professor Elinor Ostrom from Indiana University in the US a joint winner of the award, the prize committee said she has "challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed."rnShared resources are often overexploited because of the "tragedy of the commons", where users who take more than their fair share benefit privately but deplete the resource for others. Traditionally, the only two possible solutions were for the state to control the resource or break it up into private properties.