Commons and Incentives
Designing the rule, not scolding the people
About 50 minutesAdvancedSociety and AI
What your child can do at the end
Compute maximum sustainable yield and use it as the design target
The brief
The tragedy of the commons is usually told as a story about greed. It is not. Every villager in this simulation behaves exactly as a careful person would, and the resource still collapses. Elinor Ostrom spent a career documenting commons that did not collapse, and what they had in common was rules: quotas people helped set, monitoring that was cheap and local, and sanctions that started small. In this lab you build that rulebook and measure it.
Skills it develops
predictionabstractionresponsible ai
How it is assessed
3 graded challenges inside the lab, and 8 questions at the end that check the idea rather than the clicks. Every attempt is saved, so a retry after a mistake counts as the learning it is.