Preventing the tragedy of the commons through punishment of over-consumers and encouragement of under-consumers

The conditions that can lead to the exploitative depletion of a shared resource, i.e., the tragedy of the commons, can be reformulated as a game of prisoner’s dilemma: while preserving the common resource is in the best interest of the group, over-consumption is in the interest of each particular individual at any given point in time. One way to try and prevent the tragedy of the commons is through infliction of punishment for over-consumption and/or encouraging under-consumption, thus selecting against over-consumers. Here, the effectiveness of various punishment functions in an evolving consumer-resource system is evaluated within a framework of a parametrically heterogeneous system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Conditions leading to the possibility of sustainable coexistence with the common resource for a subset of cases are identified analytically using adaptive dynamics; the effects of punishment on heterogeneous populations with different initial composition are evaluated using the reduction theorem for replicator equations. Obtained results suggest that one cannot prevent the tragedy of the commons through rewarding of under-consumers alone—there must also be an implementation of some degree of punishment that increases in a nonlinear fashion with respect to over-consumption and which may vary depending on the initial distribution of clones in the population.