Essential Information & explanations, latest texts & monographs on
Collective_action.
Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups by Mancur Olson
Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador by Elisabeth Jean Wood
Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action (Comparative Politics) by Mario Diani
Governing the Commons : The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom
The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure by Brian Skyrms
Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement (American Politics and Political Economy Series) by Dennis Chong
Village Republics: Economic Conditions for Collective Action in South India by Robert Wade
Innovation in Natural Resource Management: The Role of Property Rights and Collective Action in Developing Countries by Ruth Meinzen-Dick
Shifting Involvements : Private Interest and Public Action by Albert O. Hirschman
Corporations and society : the social anthropology of collective action by M. G. Smith
Power in Movement : Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics by Sidney Tarrow
Challenging Codes : Collective Action in the Information Age by Alberto Melucci
We're Worth It!: Women and Collective Action in the Insurance Workplace by Cynthia B. Costello
Collective Action in East Asia: How Ruling Parties Shape Industrial Policy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) by Gregory W. Noble
When Health Care Employees Strike : A Guide for Planning and Action by Kenneth F. Kruger
Collective action
The economic theory of Collective action is concerned with the provision of public goods through the collaboration of two or more individuals, and the impact of externalities on group behavior.
The foundational work in collective action was Mancur Olson's 1971 book The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.
The theory explores the market failures where individual consumer rationality does not lead to efficient provision of the public goods, i.e. that another level of provision would provide a higher utility at a lower cost.
Note, however, that the theory is not a challenge to the invisible hand principle of Adam Smith: for private goods in competitive markets, the pursuit of self-interest still furthers the collective interest efficiently.
Besides economics, the theory has found many applications in political science, sociology, anthropology and the protection of the environment.
Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide")
1 Exploitation of the great by the small
2 Institutional design
2.1 Joint products
2.2 Club
2.3 Federated structure
3 See also
4 Source
Exploitation of the great by the small
Mancur Olson made the provocative claim that individual rational choice leads to situations where individuals with more resources, will carry a higher burden in the provision of the public good than poorer ones. Poorer individuals will usually choose the free rider strategy, i.e. they will attempt to benefit from the public good without contributing to its provision.
However, further theoretical analysis showed that this is not the case when individuals have widely-differing perceptions of the utility of the public good. Wikipedians, for example, put a higher value on Wikipedia than non-contributing visitors, while they may not be richer.
Institutional design
While public goods are often provided by governments, this is not always the case. Various institutional designs have been studied with the aim of reducing the collaborative failure. The best design for a given situation depends on the production costs, the utility function, and the collaborative effects, amongst other things. Here are only some examples:
Joint products
A joint-product model analyzes the collaborative effect of joining a private good to a public good. For example, a tax deduction (private good) can be tied to a donation to a charity (public good).
It can be shown that the provision of the public good increases when tied to the private good, provided that the private good is provided by a monopoly (otherwise the private good would be provided by competitors without the link to the public good).
Club
Some institutional design, e.g. intellectual property rights, can introduce an exclusion mechanism and turn a pure public good into an impure public good artificially.
If the costs of the exclusion mechanism are not higher than the gain from the collaboration, clubs can emerge. James M. Buchanan showed in his seminal paper that clubs can be an efficient alternative to government interventions.
It should be noted that a nation can be seen as a club, whose members are its citizens. Government would then be the manager of this club. This is further studied in the Theory of the State.
Federated structure
In some cases, theory shows that collaboration emerges spontaneously in smaller groups rather than in large ones.
This explains why labor unions or charities often have a federated structure.
Wikipedia is another example, where collaboration is fostered at the level of individual pages; this involves fewer participants than collaboration on the encyclopedia as a whole. Collaboration on wikibooks is more difficult for the same reason.
See also
Source
Todd Sandler, "Collective action: Theory and applications", University of Michigan Press, 1992
The above article is adapted from from Wikipedia
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