Collective Action
Last update: 10 Aug 2026 14:36First version: 20 August 2007
Yes, Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder. (In particular, it's kind of criminal not to discuss Elinor Ostrom here at length.)
- Recommended:
- Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action [How groups work, and why volunteerism is almost never sufficient to secure public goods. (Short version: if it's a public good, i.e. one from which everyone benefits without exclusion, why should you put yourself out to secure it? Surely somebody else will... Olson provides a detailed economic analysis to flesh this out.) How interest groups work, why people won't show up to union meetings but will overwhelmingly vote to make union membership compulsory, taxes and government, the weakness of large classes, etc., etc. Brilliant, if only for forcibly making collective action a problem, something to be explained rather than assumed.]
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
- Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam
- Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior
- Tom Slee, No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice [Appreciation by Tom Stafford]
- To read:
- Deepal Basak, Joyee Deb, and Aditya Kuvalekar, "Similarity of Information and Collective Action", American Economic Review 116 (2026): 1189--1233
- Drew Conway, "Networks, Collective Action, and State Formation" [Abstract, with links to PDF and code]
- Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification [To finish, one of these decades]
- Mark I. Lichbach, The Rebel's Dilemma [Hobbes meets game theory]
- Gerald Marwell and Pamela Oliver, The Critical Mass in Collective Action: A Micro-Social Theory
- Luis Fernando Medina, "The Comparative Statics of Collective Action: A Pragmatic Approach to Games with Multiple Equilibria", Rationality and Society 17 (2005): 423--452 ["The prevailing approaches to collective action in the rational choice paradigm often lead to implausible conclusions and tend to lack predictive power. This article introduces a method to overcome these difficulties. The method is based on the notion of stability sets of pure-strategy equilibria, already familiar from the literature on equilibrium selection and with close counterparts in evolutionary game theory. With the help of some simple examples, the article shows how this method can turn many intuitive insights into operational, testable hypotheses about phenomena of collective action."]
- David P. Myatt and Chris Wallace, "When Does One Bad Apple Spoil the Barrel? An Evolutionary Analysis of Collective Action", working paper 269, Economics Department, Oxford University [Thanks to Gavin Cameron for a pointer]
- Erik Nordman, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action
- Tom R. Tyler, Why People Cooperate: The Role of Social Motivations