Reputation helps solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’

The problem of sustaining a public resource that everybody is free to overuse—the ‘tragedy of the commons’1,2,3,4,5,6,7—emerges in many social dilemmas, such as our inability to sustain the global climate. Public goods experiments4, which are used to study this type of problem, usually confirm that the collective benefit will not be produced. Because individuals and countries often participate in several social games simultaneously, the...