Group 6 Section B AGTB assignment Varun gopal 12p174 Vaibhav Gupta 12p172 Mayur kumar 12p216 J abhinav 12p140

Saurabh arora 12p166 Mohit ambwani 12p152

1.

Conceptualize a real life situation demonstrating "Tragedy of commons "

An example of tragedy of commons is the sharing of common internet bandwidth by the whole hostel. The amount of bandwidth allocated to the hostel is a fixed resource. All the students need to share the same and the usage by one student affects the internet speed for others. In this case, each student is unaware of the usage by other students. A student thinks that since the total bandwidth is high, he can do heavy usage without creating a major difference in the speed for others. However as many students start thinking the same and start doing heavy usage, the speed for all the students will reduce drastically. This results in a situation where no one is able to finish his work properly because of slow speed. To monitor this we can either have a agreement among the students to control the usage per day done by each student. Secondly we can also have a third party monitoring software which will set a limit on the bandwidth that a student can consume. 2. Design a game similar to the Pisces game. Story line and the yield curve

There are total of 10 groups of 6 students each. The total bandwidth is fixed. Each group is given a file of same size to download. The grade a group gets depends on the time taken to download a file. < 30 mins : Grade A 30-40mins : Grade B 40-50 mins : Grade C > 50 mins : Grade D

If all groups set the same download speed, the file will take 60 mins to download and each group will get Grade D. However if groups collaborate then they can set a higher bandwidth but the file size will also increase. This will also affect the download time of other groups. The bandwidth left at the end of a round will carry forward to the next round.

3. Write up on the experiences during playing the game? During the play of game common resource was shared pool with fishes and survival of fishermen was only fish. To survive minimum four fishes per round as a meal was necessary for villagers and to get highest grade 90 fishes in four rounds was required. Since fish was limited and fishes required were more, competition increased and hence strategy to get maximum out of pool. We calculated based on other best and worst case, and then decided our strategy to eat, invest in private pond or build boat capacity. Other than this dependence on other villages with less population arose and there negotiation and persuasion skills were tested.

4.

A story to explain the game to a lay person

Tragedy of the Commons could be expressed in this way to a child: Let there be a huge chunk of cake and there are many children to eat it.Now each child is asked to take a piece of the cake so that cake gets distributed evenly among the children,but each child thinks let me take a big piece of the cake ,because after I eat ,there would still be sufficient amount of cake left for the other children,similarly each child would think so ,ultimately what would happen that a large amount of cake would be eaten by a few ,some would would get a very small amount and some would not get a single piece of it. Thus this can be taken as an example of 'tragedy of commons'

5. post game reflections Individual responses

Vaibhav Gupta

With less resources, low reproduction rate and more frequent usage led players to play in accordance to them. Survival and getting good grades was first priority than thinking of next generations. Help from other villages with less population was asked and needed to be considered by every village. Calculations were made and signals were noted to design best and worst case scenarios. In first round getting 4 fishes from other village helped us eventually to earn 4*7*7 fishes more (Where 7 was number of group members and multiplication factor is boat building capacity rate). In end though we wanted to help some upstream generation but unfortunately we could not help. Anticipation and signal from groups was required before taking decisions in round and thereafter making strategy. Reproduction in private pool was increasing curve while common pool was linear so decisions were to make initially and planned approach should have been followed.

Varun Gopal In our group, no fishes were left for us by previous generations. We used the first 3 rounds to increase the capacity of our boat. We did not invest any fishes in expanding the private pond. By the fourth round, there was no fishes left in the common pond and hence we were not able to eat anything. So we could only eat the minimum number of fishes and not more. Resources were less, reproduction rate was low, and other groups ate too many fishes. Survival and getting good grades was first priority than thinking of next generations. Help from other villages with less population was asked and needed to be considered by every village. Calculations were made and signals were noted to design best and worst case scenario and signal from groups was required before taking decisions in round and thereafter making strategy

Mohit Ambwani Well ,we first of all thought of increasing the size of our boat ,but did not thought of increasing the pond size .As a result, slowly the fishes of the lake finished and we were left with nothing. So ,as a result we were not able to meet our goal of 90 fishes. Collaboration and trust were two essentials principle needed for the game, these were the areas our class lacked in. Each one gave priority to good grade marks as a result nobody thought of the future generations. I feel that if the condition of eating 90 fishes for top grade was not imposed, the fishery could have been sustained as everyone could have eaten just the amount of fishes they want for survival and invested the rest for future generations. Saurabh Arora

The target of 90 fishes to get A+ grade was superficial and the game itself was not even close to reality. In reality, everyone would have acted differently in this scenario. In real scenario, people would have been satisfied to by eating just 4 fishes that was sufficient for their survival. Some people might have more desires and eat more than 4 fishes but still 90 fishes was just too much. Here, when our grades are on stake, we would never think about our future generations even if we play this game again. Plus, we knew that this was a game and not real so I believe theres no actual benefit in doing anything about the future generations. The only thing that was real in this game was our grades. Apart from that, I believe there should have been a common bank kind of system in the game similar to World Bank or IMF from where we can take a loan. And if one team donates fishes to the other team that could be on considered on loan or may there should be a clause to return that many fishes plus some more fishes after some rounds. J abhinav My Group was Leo and it was one of the two groups where each member ate 90+ fishes, the other being Pisces. We also had the maximum number of members of all Zodiac signs in our generation: Seven. My main motive was survival and eating 90 fishes for four rounds. I feel that if the second condition of eating 90 fishes for top grade was not imposed, the fishery could have been sustained as everyone could have eaten just the amount of fishes they want for survival and invested the rest for future generations. My team being the one that consumed most fishes to get the top grade made me realize this fact and that this scenario was entirely pointless. This is highly relevant to life because in life too we have basic necessities for living and needs imposed by society, like status, wealth, power etc. I believe that it is these imposed needs that drive people to consume more resources than they really need. It is because of these needs that people become greedy and do not think beyond their own selves and closest of kin. This has again ensured that, as in the game, the planets natural resources are depleting at a rapid rate and we are all going to be left with nothing one day. I felt that the game was a beautiful metaphor for the current scenario our planet is in.

Mayur kumar Everyone tries to maximize their own interests in such a manner that leads to over exploitation and non sustainability of the natural resource. In the game played the task given to every team was to consume 90+ fishes per person even though only 4 per turn were required to sustain. The time frame given to play the game was too short to consume 90 fishes which led to the race for depleting the common pond. The game which was supposed to end 4 rounds actually ended with the common pond depleted in 2.5 rounds. This example can be related with real life scenarios such as forest cover, fuel, water etc. The situation becomes more so undesirable in case of non renewable resources such as coal, petroleum etc. Everyone tries to exploit the common pool of resources and create sub pools for himself to sustain in the long run.