Cooperation problems writ large. How do a million people work together?
See also democracy etc.
Rabbit and stag game
A game theoretical model of coordination which throws some light on the problems of social coordination. This is pertinent in problems of, e.g. having democracy or of getting peer networks off Facebook. As seen in Duncan Sabien’s Group Rationality musing, and Zvi Mowshowitz on the Facebook exodus problem. Casting it in in these terms is provoking.
Collective Action Dilemmas for Elites
An infrequently-mentioned special case of collective action problem that I pose, which is of interest to me. See e.g. (Singh 2014).
In the state’s husbandry of the pigs of the economy, one might argue that the prime task is to ensure that said pigs “do not eat where they shit”. Damn but those pigs squeal if you try to tell them what to do, though. It’s their shitpuddle, they worked hard to shit it.
Here I will discuss dilemmas of collective action for corporations; If every business wants highly paid customers and low-paid staff, whose job is it to provide customers? (The obvious solution of corporate tax providing a basic income to an jobless consumer class will be disregarded as politically untenable for now.) If every business wants state-provided infrastructure but must complain about their own personal share of the costs, which businesses are left holding the can? If every business knows that all their peers are lobbying to sell off the state assets for scrap, mightn’t they as well take a piece of the pie rather than be the only ones who were left out of the action?
Can you resolve this through a cartel? Our business won’t whine for special subsidy if yours doesn’t, we all win? I think in this case it might reduce to prisoner’s dilemma.
Trust
Social capital. Development version, Bo Rothstein, How the Trust Trap Perpetuates Inequality
Berg, Lars Petter. 2013. “Inequality, Collective Action and Democratic Transition: A Refined Investigation of the Relationship Between Inequality and Democratization.” https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/36962.
Casper, Brett Allen, and Scott A. Tyson. 2014. “Popular Protest and Elite Coordination in a Coup d’état.” The Journal of Politics 76 (02): 548–64. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381613001485.
Chater, Nick. n.d. “Would You Stand up to an Oppressive Regime or Would You Conform? Here’s the Science.” The Conversation. Accessed March 9, 2020. http://theconversation.com/would-you-stand-up-to-an-oppressive-regime-or-would-you-conform-heres-the-science-124469.
Chong, Dennis. 1991. Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement. American Politics and Political Economy Series. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Coleman, James. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Belknap Press.
Gordon, Deborah M. 2014. “The Ecology of Collective Behavior.” PLoS Biol 12 (3): e1001805. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001805.
Hardin, Russell. 1982. Collective Action. Baltimore: Published for Resources for the Future by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hauert, Christoph, Silvia De Monte, Josef Hofbauer, and Karl Sigmund. 2002. “Volunteering as Red Queen Mechanism for Cooperation in Public Goods Games.” Science 296 (5570): 1129–32. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1070582.
Heckathorn, Douglas D. 1996. “The Dynamics and Dilemmas of Collective Action.” American Sociological Review 61 (2): 250–77. https://doi.org/10.2307/2096334.
Holzinger, Katharina. 2003. “The Problems of Collective Action: A New Approach.” Preprints aus der Max-Planck-Projektgruppe Recht der Gemeinschaftsgüter. http://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/85085.
Olson, Mancur. 2009. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Vol. 124. Harvard University Press.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). Cambridge University Press.
———. 1998. “A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action.” The American Political Science Review 92: 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/2585925.
———. 2000. “Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 14: 137–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/2646923.
Rao, Vijayendra. 2005. “Symbolic Public Goods and the Coordination of Collective Action: A Comparison of Local Development in India and Indonesia.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, no. 3685. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=786613.
Sarigol, Emre, David Garcia, and Frank Schweitzer. 2014. “Online Privacy as a Collective Phenomenon.” In Proceedings of the Second ACM Conference on Online Social Networks, 95–106. COSN ’14. Dublin, Ireland: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2660460.2660470.
Singh, Naunihal. 2014. Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.