Rent-seeking and the tragedy of the commons: two approaches to problems of collective action in biology and economics

I am interested in how models, practices, and concepts travel across specialties and thereby change and are changed in turn. In the present essay I discuss Gordon Tullock’s ideas about the relationship between biology and economics in the light of his correspondence with the biologist Garrett Hardin. Tullock contributed to one of Hardin’s edited projects, but they took different approaches to related problems, which I characterize as problems of coordinated action. Tullock saw that he and Hardin were up to a similar line of inquiry, and Hardin engaged with him up to a point, but ultimately the biologist differed with the economist regarding the potential for the reliability of a regulating power such as the state.