Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

In organizations, conflict often revolves around commons resources because they are critical for influence, performance, and organizational survival. Research on property rights, territoriality, and social dilemmas suggests that to reduce such conflict, organizations should facilitate the (psychological) privatization of commons resources. We complement these three literatures by drawing from the legal, organizational, and social psychology literatures to model how psychologically privatizing organizational commons resources – to prevent a tragedy of the commons (an overuse problem) – can lead to the emergence of equivalently problematic tragedy in organizations: the tragedy of the anticommons (an underuse problem). Our model contributes to these literatures by conceptualizing a bottom-up behavioral process (in contrast to institutional allocation) of property distribution that leads to the emergence of the tragedy of the anticommons. The implications of this bottom-up behavioral process for property rights theory, territoriality theory, and the social dilemma paradigm are discussed.

Comments

Working Paper 12-14

This paper later underwent peer review and was published as:

McCarter, M.W., Kopelman, S., Turk, T.A., & Ybarra, C. (2021). Too many cooks spoil the broth: Toward a theory for how the tragedy of the anticommons emerges in organizations. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 14(2), 60-74. https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12174

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