The issue of managing the natural resources shared by large numbers of people is attracting the attention of economic policy makers. To solve this problem, either government regulation or privatization of such resources is usually proposed. But neither the state nor the market has demonstrated unequivocally successful results in this area. After a critical analysis of the fundamentals of the dominant approach to assessing economic policy for natural resources, the author sets out a unique corpus of empirical data obtained from a study of the conditions under which the problems of shared resources were solved satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily. At the beginning, E. Ostrom describes three models most often used to develop recommendations - appealing either to the state or to the market. Then, after illustrating the variety of possible solutions, she applies institutional analysis to investigate different ways - both successful and unsuccessful - of managing shared resources. It turns out that sometimes the problems of common resources are resolved within the framework of voluntary organizations without resorting to state coercion. In 2009, the author received the Nobel Prize in Economics for her research.