Quotes from Governing the Commons

By Elinor Ostrom (1990)

• Institutional analysis that simply posits an external, zero-cost enforcer has not addressed the possibility that the rules devised by appropriators may themselves have a major effect on the costs, and therefore the efficiency, of monitoring by internal or external enforcers.#
  Institutions
• A previously unrecognized “private” benefit of monitoring in settings in which information is costly is that one obtains the information necessary to adopt a contingent strategy.#
  Institutions

Richmond Campbell, Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation: Prisoner’s Dilemma and Newcomb’s Problem (1985)

• Quite simply, these paradoxes cast in doubt our understanding of rationality and, in the case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, suggest that it is impossible for rational creatures to cooperate. Thus, they bear directly on fundamental issues in ethics and political philosophy and threaten the foundations of the social sciences. It is the scope of these consequences that explains why these paradoxes have drawn so much attention and why they command a central place in philosophical discussion.#
  Ethics