Collective intelligence and social computing systems play an increasingly important role in collective action—that is, “actions taken by two or more people in pursuit of the same collective good” [Marwell and Oliver 1993]. Social computing platforms that advance collective action connect crowds and communities of participants, lower the cost of communication, facilitate deliberation, and help t...

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...

Collective Action under Uncertainty Michael Thomas McBride 2002 I examine collective action under uncertainty in public good games and social networks. The first chapter analyzes discrete public good games in which the threshold number of contributions needed for provision is randomly selected from a known probability distribution function. Simultaneous voluntary-contribution equilibria are oft...

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 ...

In the natural world, performing a given task which is beneficial to an entire group often requires the cooperation of several individuals of that group who often share the workload required to perform the task. The modeling toolkit to address problems related with the dynamics of collective action and other conflict of interests is game theory, often combined with its dynamical counterpart, Ev...

Conßict is of course central to Marxian economics. Consistent with Marx and Engels’ (1848, 3) belief that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” most, but not all, of the conßict described involves classes, either “fundamental” or “subsumed” (Resnick and Wolff 1982). Some of it involves individuals, however, on one or both sides, often in different “cl...

In recent years, scholars have turned to alternative representations of utility to capture motivational heterogeneity across individuals. In the research reported here, we examine two models of heterogeneous utility—linear-altruism and inequity-aversion—in the context of two-person, social dilemma games. Empirical tests are conducted drawing on data from experiments and surveys. We find that th...

In a model where cooperation is beneficial, but subject to cheating, and is supported by trigger strategy punishments in a repeated game, we explore the relationship between the nature of cooperation (size and composition of coalitions) and underlying inequality in the distribution of private productive assets. JEL Codes: C72, D30, D70, O10, P0

This review focuses on formal theories and models of collective action. There are many types of collective action, and they cannot all be captured with the same formal model. Four types of models are reviewed: single-actor models which treat the "group" behavior as given; models of the interdependent aggregation of individual choices into collective action; models of the collective decisions of...

Put in a nutshell, the following view of the nature of communicative action seems worth considering. Communication presupposes a framework of mutual knowledge (at least mutual true beliefs) and assumptions about language (or whatever representational system is used). This underlying level need not contain any knowledge or assumptions about the goals of the users of language, in particular no as...