Question

In his article "Free Riders en Route to Disaster," Julian Edney describes a common property game involving nuts in a bowl. He describes some of the group solutions to the game as quite creative. Quoting him, "One of the groups, for example, decided that to slow down the “harvest,” they would have to skewer each nut on the end of a pencil, balance it on their noses, and walk over to deposit it in a chalkboard tray before returning for another single nut." Edney seems to feel that this "solution" solved the problem. Discuss, using an economic perspective, whether it did. What would be your proposed solution to slow the “harvest”?

Answer 1

The proposed “solution” does decrease the harvest rate, but, however it does it by consuming significant amount of time which could be termed as a waste (of time resource).

From an economic perspective, it indicates waste of resources. Time taken would be definitely be much higher. Moreover, the labor would be doing almost a counter-productive work. In a scenario where the work-force has absolutely nothing else to do, this could get considered as some type of utilization. This solution is highly inefficient.

In this case, the best thing for the group to do from an efficiency perspective it not to remove any nuts from the bowl until right before the end of the game. Balancing pencils on noses won’t accomplish this.