June 14, 2022 12:00 PM (GMT+1)

“Collective action can be defined as decentralized action by the members of a group to eliminate public bads that affect all of them or to create public goods that benefit all of them. Although such actions benefit everybody (they are Pareto-superior to the status quo), it may not be in the self-interest of any individual to participate or contribute.” (Elster, 2015)

Tutorial Questions

• Name examples we discussed in the the tutorials of the Collective action problem
• Is voting in political elections rational? why do we do it? and is it a collective action problem?
• Climate Change — what drives, and what hinders, collective action tackling Climate Change?
• Provide an example where social networks are important for collective action and explain why and how.
• What roles could information asymmetry play in regards to collective actions?
• Explain the role of ‘critical mass’ by using a collective action example. Follow up: Can you think of any other important theories from social dynamics or social network theory?
• Technology and inventions — how can they facilitate, trigger, influence collective action?

Essay Questions

• Can social networks explain how individuals can overcome the problem of collective action?
• Under what conditions can cooperation emerge from repeated interactions?
• ’Neither lab experiments nor observational data confirm the prediction of a Nash Equilibrium in a prisoner’s dilemma’. Discuss.

Reading List

• Delia Baldassarri, ‘Collective Action’, Peter Bearmanand Peter Hedström (eds), Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology, 2011.
• Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: ’More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences’, 2007, Ch. 23 (Collective action).
• Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984.