Question

yakov, charles, and gilberto are crabbers who live next to a ocean that is open to crabbing; in other words, anyone is free to use the ocean for crabbing. assume that these men are the only three crabbers who crab fish in this ocean and that the ocean is large enough for all three crabbers to crab fish intensively at the same time. each year, the crabbers choose independently how many crabs to catch; specifically, they choose whether to crab fish intensively (that is, to place several crab traps in the water for long stretches of time, which hurts the sustainability of the ocean if enough people do it) or to crab fish nonintensively (which does not hurt the sustainability of the ocean). none of them has the ability to control how much the others crab fish, and each crabber cares only about his own profitability and not about the state of the ocean. assume that as long as no more than one crabber crab fishes intensively, there are enough crabs to restock the ocean. however, if two or more crab fish intensively, the ocean will become useless in the future. of course, crabbing intensively earns a crabber more money and greater profit because he can sell more crabs. the ocean is an example of because the crabs in the ocean are and

Answer 1

The scenario of the three crabbers fishing in a shared ocean is an example of the Tragedy of the Commons, where common resource overuse occurs without individual incentives to harvest responsibly. Solutions to this include implementing fishing licenses, catch limits, and catch shares to align individual incentives with sustainable practices. When populations decline severely, harvesting bans have been enacted to allow recovery.

Step-by-step explanation:

The scenario described with Yakov, Charles, and Gilberto is a classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons, which occurs when individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one's self-interest, behave contrary to the whole group's long-term best interests by depleting a common resource. The ocean being open to crabbing without any restrictions leads to a risk where if two or more crabbers fish intensively, they could hurt the sustainability of the oceanic crab populations. This dilemma is rooted in the lack of incentive for individuals to exercise restraint in harvesting resources from commonly shared areas.

To address such overexploitation, traditional solutions have included enacting fishing licenses, harvest limits, and shorter fishing seasons. More contemporary measures have included establishing total allowable catches and allocating catch shares to fishermen, aligning individual fishermen's incentives with the sustainability of the fishery. Nevertheless, when certain species face critical population decline, governments have sometimes banned harvesting altogether until populations recover, like with the conch in the United States.