Suppose that a group of people meet to determine the cost allocation of a collective action, and that each individual’s valuation of the collective action is private and independent of all others’ values. With this information structure there is an incentive problem—each individual has an incentive to understate value in order to lower his or her cost share of the collective action. This paper ...

Several theories have emerged to explain how group cooperation (collective action) can arise and be maintained in the face of incentives to engage in free riding. Explanations focusing on reputational benefits and partner choice have particular promise for cases in which punishment is absent or insufficient to deter free riding. In indigenous communities of highland Peru, collective action is p...

While a large amount of work has been done to understand public good and to construct conceptual models explaining the antecedents of collective action, current literature is flawed in that most of them only examine the lower-level public good and attribute people’s participation in collective action to external variables. It pays little to the developmental nature of collective action. Utilizi...

Although negative out-group beliefs typically foster individuals’ motivation for collective action, we propose that such beliefs may diminish this motivation when people believe that this out-group cannot change in its very essence. Specifically, we tested the idea that believing in the malleability of immoral out-groups (i.e., targets of collective action) should increase collective action ten...

This paper examines the role of Chinese social media in three areas: organizing collective action, surveillance of government offi cials, and propaganda. Our study is based on a data set of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo — the most prominent Chinese microblogging platform — during the 2009-2013 period. We find millions of posts discussing explicit corruption allegations and col...

Communities with high levels of social capital are likely to have a higher quality of life than communities with low social capital (Coleman, 1988, 1990; Putnam, 1993, 2000). This is due to the greater ability of such communities to organize and mobilize effectively for collective action because they have high levels of social trust, social networks, and well-established norms of mutuality (the...

Insights from appraisal theories of emotion are used to integrate elements of theories on collective action. Three experiments with disadvantaged groups systematically manipulated procedural fairness (Study 1), emotional social support (Study 2), and instrumental social support (Study 3) to examine their effects on collective action tendencies through group-based anger and group efficacy. Resul...

This study aims to achieve a semiotic understanding of collective memory of the Iran-Iraq war. For this purpose, samples of images in virtual social networks shared in response to the news of discovery and return of the bodies of more than 175 divers have been analyzed. Visual signs in photographs, cartoons, graphic designs, prints, paintings and posters, in methods of historical pictures and f...

Analyzing how collective action leading to mass innovation emerges against the backdrop of an increasingly connected world, we introduce the concept of collective generativity as a new theoretical lens for understanding the ability of distributed communities to engage collectively in bottom-up processes of creation and innovation. Applying this lens allows us to understand how collective genera...

In this paper, we propose a framework of motivations about why people participate in crowdsourcing without monetary incentives. The framework is based on the four pillars of crowdsourcing as well as the motivations referenced from collective action studies. We argue that crowdsourcing is not only about collective intelligence but is also similar to collective action, particularly when there is ...