Inequality, Coalitions and Collective Action

Regulated Prices as Collective Goods: The Case of New York Cable Systems

This paper examines the extent to which individuals seeking diffuse benefits from a regulator can overcome the free-rider problem. Specifically, I provide an explanation of why cable television rates are not consistently set at either the monopoly price or the competitive price -namely, communities differ in their ability to act collectively or form rent seeking coalitions. A model, motivated b...

The Endogenous Formation of Coalitions to Provide Public Goods: Theory and Experimental Evidence

This paper examines the endogenous formation of coalitions that provide public goods in which players implement a minimum participation requirement before deciding whether to join. We demonstrate theoretically that payoff-maximizing players will vote to implement efficient participation requirements and these coalitions will form. However, we also demonstrate that if some players are averse to ...

Analyzing the Costs of Collective Actions for Political, Administrative, and Economic Agents to Facilitate Investment

The processes of collective action of individuals within the government organization and the formation and modification of these processes in the private sector have fundamental differences with collective action. A collective action, either in the form of an activity or in the form of a reform of an entity, both has transaction costs for agents within the process. So, a collective action withi...

Inequality and Collective Action

We analyze the e ect of inequality in the distribution of endowment of private inputs (e.g., land, wealth) that are complementary in production with collective inputs (e.g., contribution to public goods such as irrigation and extraction from common-property resources) on eÆciency in a simple class of collective action problems. In an environment where transaction costs prevent the eÆcient alloc...

Inequality in Collective Action Problems