Something I posted to Facebook earlier today; please bear that audience in mind when reading it:

It's Ada Lovelace Day, a day for celebrating and publicising the achievement of women in the sciences, and since I talked about the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics yesterday, I figure I'd go two-for-two and talk about Elinor Ostrom today.

In March of this year I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Elinor Ostrom, about her work in common pool resources, which won her a Nobel Prize in 2009. To date, she is the only woman to win a Nobel Prize in this category. I wanted to ask her a question about organised crime.

Imagine you own one of several fishing boats on a lake. The fish are a common pool resource. Without any kind of governance, the lake will be over-fished, because no single fishing boat has any incentive to restrict their catch unless all of them do, and it's too easy for any single boat to defect from any mutual agreement, so no agreement ever gets made. This is known as the Tragedy of the Commons.

There are a few options that tend to arise from this situation. The first is government intervention, where legislation is passed to limit how many fish any one boat can catch. This tends to go wrong, because legislators don't know very much about the fishing industry.

The second option is to merge all the fishing boats into one big fishing company. It now won't over-fish, but it will cause monopoly problems. Fish consumers will pay relatively more money for relatively less fish, and some mechanism has to exist to stop anyone else setting up their own rival fishing company. This is not optimal.

Elinor Ostrom's work concerns the third option: stable self-governance between multiple parties. This is ridiculously hard to achieve in real-world situations. Ostrom carried out extensive field studies in developing countries to find out under what circumstances a common pool resource could be sustainably managed by the people using it, and by extention, how we might design systems to let people do this. It has important implications for the development, welfare, politics and environmental protection of poor and wealthy countries alike.

During the Q&A of the lecture, I wanted to ask her if she had considered extortion in organised crime as a potential area of study. It fits the criteria of a common pool resource, and economists love organised crime, so there's a wealth of data about it. Unfortunately I wasn't picked to ask my question.

In June of this year, ten weeks later, she died of pancreatic cancer, and now I will never get to ask it.