Is there any way in which The Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Tragedy of the Commons do not describe identical games? (I mean, any way other than that the former is traditionally conceptualized as a two-player game while the latter can have any number of players.)
Yes; in the Tragedy of the Commons the actions of the “other player,” whether or not more than n people use the commons, partially depends on your choice. See here.
Also, as I just said, the thing of interest (how many packets you send/how many goats you graze) is continuous (ish) rather than a discrete choice. This has an important consequence: while an analogy to the PD would lead one to believe that the Nash Equilibrium would be everybody sending as many packets as possible, that’s not actually the right answer in the Tragedy of the Commons: no one player desires to send as many packets as possible.
Is there any way in which The Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Tragedy of the Commons do not describe identical games? (I mean, any way other than that the former is traditionally conceptualized as a two-player game while the latter can have any number of players.)
Yes; in the Tragedy of the Commons the actions of the “other player,” whether or not more than n people use the commons, partially depends on your choice. See here.
Also, as I just said, the thing of interest (how many packets you send/how many goats you graze) is continuous (ish) rather than a discrete choice. This has an important consequence: while an analogy to the PD would lead one to believe that the Nash Equilibrium would be everybody sending as many packets as possible, that’s not actually the right answer in the Tragedy of the Commons: no one player desires to send as many packets as possible.