Yes. When I lived in an apartment building, I wouldn't have cared if one of my neighbors occasionally rented out their spare bedroom to a friend of a friend. But when half of the units in the building are renting out rooms, and some of them are 100% dedicated to short-term rentals, it gets to be too much. In other words, ruining it for everyone...

I'm confused.. tragedy of the commons is when nobody owns something thus nobody takes care of it. Folks who rent on AirBnB either own it or have defacto control over it.

This isn't an example of tragedy of the commons at all.

> I'm confused.. tragedy of the commons is when nobody owns something thus nobody takes care of it.

"Tragedy of the commons" is a common name for a multiparty game that bears some relation to the two party Prisoner's Dilemma, wherein each party has a dominant strategy of defection, despite the fact that the resulting universal defection has a lower utility for all parties than universal cooperation would.

(In more economic than game-theory terms, this is a situation where cooperation has an internalized cost and an externalized benefit, and the reverse is true for defection.)

The situation where nobody owns exclusive rights to common grazing land and thus everyone overgrazes their sheep on it and wrecks it, resulting in harm for everyone, is the typical illustrative example from which the name is drawn, but the "Tragedy of the Commons" doesn't refer exclusively to the situation where waste results from the absence of exclusive rights.

Basically, it's when everybody does what's best for them personally, to the detriment of society as a whole.

Yes. When nobody owns something, nobody takes care of it. Consider the sound environment. No one charges you to broadcast your music or your voice through the air. Another example would be odors from cooking or smoking.

People in proximity share resources even if they don't want to. Anonymous temporary interaction affects what people think they can get away with. If we're neighbors for a year, we can sort out our differences and come up with some rules. I promise not to have a loud party without telling you in advance, for example. If we're having a shorter term interaction, say over a weekend, I don't know your expectations, and frankly i don't care. so i'll just go ahead and be loud till you call the police.

See also Ronald Coase: The Problem of Social Cost.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/03/r...

Ironically, the historic commons referred to there actually had customary rules that prevented overgrazing -- it wasn't the idealized "free-for-all" that this term now evokes -- and modern neighborhoods and apartment complex likewise have such rules to prevent overuse of public resources or common goods, such as limits on rentals to non-tenants (which are being flouted).

That was the irony I was attempting to point out.