Collective Action as Individual Choice

Collective Action as Individual Choice

Collective action raises both conceptual and descriptive questions. The conceptual question concerns when we should count a set of actions performed by individuals as a unified ‘collective action’. For example, when a group of passengers aboard a broken bus spontaneously exit the bus and push it off the railroad tracks, we would call this event an instance of ‘collective action’ – we would say ...

Individual Rationality in Collective Choice

This paper studies the rationality of an individual player in sequential games of perfect information played with other players who are not necessarily rational. The paper proposes a set of properties on the choice behavior and shows that they are equivalent to the rationality of an individual player at the initial node independently of the behavioral norm of the other players. Furthermore, I s...

Individual Choice, Collective Action, and the Problem of Training Reform: Insights from France and eastern Germany

Collective action and individual choice: rethinking how we regulate narcotics and antibiotics.

Governments across the globe have squandered treasure and imprisoned millions of their own citizens by criminalising the use and sale of recreational drugs. But use of these drugs has remained relatively constant, and the primary victims are the users themselves. Meanwhile, antimicrobial drugs that once had the power to cure infections are losing their ability to do so, compromising the health ...

Environmental Activism as Collective Action

The literature on environmental activism has failed to produce a model of individual decision making explicitly linked to the logic of collective action. To remedy this problem, this article adapts the collective interest model developed by Finkel, Muller, and Opp to explain protest behavior and argues environmental activism is a function of citizen beliefs about collective benefits, the abilit...