Collective action bibliography

Annotated list of the books and papers this knowledge base draws on, grouped by theme, with a note on what each is good for and how far it has been read here.

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Collective action bibliography

The sources this knowledge base uses or plans to use, grouped by theme. Each entry gives the citation and one or two lines on what the source is and what it is for here. "Not yet read here" means the source is cited from memory or from another author's summary and has not been checked at first hand; claims resting on it are marked as such in the working notes. Where a source has been read in part, the entry says which part.

Pages that use these sources: Patterns of collective action, Game theory basics, Governing the commons, Cooperation at scale, Cultural evolution.

Foundations

  • Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press. The standard statement that large groups with shared interests don't supply public goods without Selective incentives; source of the Privileged group and Latent group terms. Read in part (5th printing, 1975; OCR scan): pp. 3, 28–29, 35, 48–52, covering privileged, intermediate and latent groups (pp. 49–51), selective incentives (p. 51) and the "exploitation" of the great by the small (pp. 3, 29, 35). See Mancur Olson.
  • Hardin, Russell. 1982. Collective Action. Johns Hopkins University Press for Resources for the Future. Treats collective action as an n-person prisoner's dilemma. Useful as the main statement of the 'battle line' reading of the problem. Not yet read here; known through Sandler (1992, p. 44), who quotes and rejects Hardin's p. 25.
  • Hardin, Garrett. 1968. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162: 1243–1248. The essay behind Tragedy of the commons, and his proposed answer, Mutual coercion. See Garrett Hardin. Not yet read here.
  • Schelling, Thomas C. 1960. The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard University Press. Source for Focal point and Credible commitment, and for the chicken-style standoff. Not yet read here.
  • Schelling, Thomas C. 1978. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. W. W. Norton. Chapter 7 treats binary choices with externalities as payoff curves against the number who choose; a way to draw the collective action patterns. Schelling doesn't use the names chicken or assurance; that mapping is Dixit, Skeath and Reiley's (p. 431, n. 3). Read: ch. 7 (2006 edition), with page numbers from a Google Books page map not yet checked against print. See Thomas Schelling.

Game structure and typologies

These are the sources for sorting collective action problems into types. They feed Patterns of collective action.

  • Taylor, Michael. 1987. The Possibility of Cooperation. Cambridge University Press. Treats the prisoner's dilemma, chicken and assurance as separate games and works through the n-person versions. Read in part: pp. 16–19 and 34–45, to check points on chicken and assurance.
  • Heckathorn, Douglas D. 1996. "The Dynamics and Dilemmas of Collective Action." American Sociological Review 61(2): 250–277. Derives a five-game typology by reversing pairs of payoffs in the prisoner's dilemma, and ties it to the shape of the return to joining. Read in part: pp. 257–259 only; the scan has no text layer.
  • Kollock, Peter. 1998. "Social Dilemmas: The Anatomy of Cooperation." Annual Review of Sociology 24: 183–214. A survey of social dilemmas by game type, group size and kind of solution. Abstract only so far; section structure and solutions typology still to check.
  • Rapoport, Anatol, and Melvin Guyer. 1966. "A Taxonomy of 2×2 Games." General Systems 11: 203–214. Lists the 78 strictly ordinal 2×2 games; Heckathorn uses its game numbers. Not yet read here.
  • Robinson, David, and David Goforth. 2005. The Topology of the 2×2 Games: A New Periodic Table. Routledge. Arranges the 2×2 games in a single table. Useful as a map of the whole space. Not yet read here.
  • Diekmann, Andreas. 1985. "Volunteer's Dilemma." Journal of Conflict Resolution 29(4): 605–610. The model of a good that is supplied if at least one person bears the cost; the basis for the volunteer pattern and its group-size result. Not yet read here; the same model is page-cited from Dixit, Skeath and Reiley (pp. 455–457), who base it on Palfrey and Rosenthal (1984).
  • Ullmann-Margalit, Edna. 1977. The Emergence of Norms. Oxford University Press. Sorts norms by the problem they solve: prisoner's dilemma, coordination, and partiality. Not yet read here; whether 'norms of partiality' map onto anything in the typology is open.
  • Marwell, Gerald, and Pamela Oliver. 1993. The Critical Mass in Collective Action: A Micro-Social Theory. Cambridge University Press. Distinguishes accelerating from decelerating production functions, which line up with the stag hunt and volunteer patterns. Not yet read here.
  • Hirshleifer, Jack. 1983. "From Weakest-Link to Best-Shot: The Voluntary Provision of Public Goods." Public Choice 41: 371–386. Source of the aggregation technologies (sum, weakest link, best shot) that Sandler builds on. Not yet read here; known through its abstract and Sandler (1992, pp. 9, 36, 43).
  • Doebeli, Michael, and Christoph Hauert. 2005. "Models of Cooperation Based on the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Snowdrift Game." Ecology Letters 8: 748–766. The standard biology review using the snowdrift name for chicken. Not yet read here; checked bibliographically.
  • Macy, Michael W., and Andreas Flache. 2002. "Learning Dynamics in Social Dilemmas." PNAS 99 (suppl. 3): 7229–7236. The source used here for the "greed" and "fear" terms (see Greed and fear). Checked.
  • Dawes, Robyn M. 1980. "Social Dilemmas." Annual Review of Psychology 31: 169–193. An early survey that helped establish "social dilemma" as the term. Not yet read here.
  • Harsanyi, John C., and Reinhard Selten. 1988. A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games. MIT Press. Source of risk dominance, which decides which equilibrium of a stag hunt is the likelier one. See Stag hunt. Not yet read here.
  • Lewis, David. 1969. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Harvard University Press. Conventions as solutions to coordination problems. Cited alongside Schelling. Not yet read here.

Textbooks

  • Osborne, Martin J., and Ariel Rubinstein. 1994. A Course in Game Theory. MIT Press. The main textbook source for payoff matrices and equilibria. Read in part: §2.3 (pp. 15–18), §3.1, §3.3, §3.4, §8.1–8.2, §8.5 and §10.1. See Game theory basics, Nash equilibrium.
  • Dixit, Avinash K., Susan Skeath, and David Reiley. 2015. Games of Strategy. 4th ed. W. W. Norton. Chapter 11 sorts collective-action games into prisoner's dilemma, chicken and assurance (p. 418) and draws them as n-person payoff curves (pp. 423–430); the "Help!" section gives the volunteer's dilemma model (pp. 455–457). Read in part: pp. 394, 417–431, 443–450, 454–457. (Later editions replace Reiley with David McAdams.)
  • Mas-Colell, Andreu, Michael D. Whinston, and Jerry R. Green. 1995. Microeconomic Theory. Oxford University Press. Graduate reference for public goods, externalities and mechanism design (chapters 11, 13–14 and 23 are the ones flagged). Not yet read here.
  • Sandler, Todd. 1992. Collective Action: Theory and Applications. University of Michigan Press. Maps the "technology of public supply" to game forms: summation to the prisoner's dilemma, or chicken when doing nothing is a disaster (pp. 40–41); weakest link to assurance (pp. 43–44); best shot to a "coordination" game like battle of the sexes (p. 41), whose payoff order we read as the volunteer's dilemma. Rejects equating collective action with the prisoner's dilemma (p. 44). Read in part: pp. 8–11, 35–48, 125–126. See Aggregation technologies.
  • Sandler, Todd. 2004. Global Collective Action. Cambridge University Press. Makes aggregation technology a dimension of publicness and adds threshold, which gives assurance (p. 64); summary in Table 3.2 (p. 68). Reads the Montreal Protocol as a privileged-group case (pp. 217–218). Read in part: pp. 5–6, 32, 36, 46, 60–68, 217–218.
  • Cornes, Richard, and Todd Sandler. 1996. The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods, and Club Goods. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press. Fuller economic treatment of public goods, including how contributions aggregate. Not yet read here; not yet cited in the notes.

Commons and institutions

  • Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press. The empirical case that communities often manage shared resources without privatization or a state, and the design principles that recur. Read in part: ch. 1 and 2 in full (pp. 1–57), plus notes. See Elinor Ostrom, Ostrom design principles.
  • Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton University Press. Extends the framework to rules and institutions in general. Searched only; not used yet.
  • Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. 2007. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. MIT Press. Applies the commons framework to knowledge, relevant to Information commons. Read in part: chapter 1 by Hess and Ostrom, pp. 4–5 and 9–10.

Incentives and mechanism design

  • Laffont, Jean-Jacques, and David Martimort. 2002. The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model. Princeton University Press. Textbook on contracting under asymmetric information. Read in part: pp. 13–14 and 23–24, including the free-rider problem among several agents.
  • Holmström, Bengt. 1982. "Moral Hazard in Teams." Bell Journal of Economics 13(2): 324–340. Shows that with a budget-balanced sharing rule, team members under-supply effort. Used as the prisoner's dilemma inside an organization. Not yet read here.
  • Alchian, Armen A., and Harold Demsetz. 1972. "Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization." American Economic Review 62(5): 777–795. The argument that team output can't be split by contribution, which creates a role for a monitor. Not yet read here; known through Ostrom (1990), p. 221, n. 13.

Cooperation and evolution

These are linked from Cooperation at scale and Cultural evolution; none has been used as a source for a claim yet.

  • Axelrod, Robert. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books. The tournament results and the case for repeated interaction. See Robert Axelrod, Tit for tat. Not yet read here.
  • Skyrms, Brian. 2004. The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure. Cambridge University Press. The stag hunt treated as an evolutionary game. Out of scope for the typology beyond one line. Not yet read here.
  • Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success. Princeton University Press. Culture and group-level selection in human cooperation. See Joseph Henrich, Cultural group selection. Not yet read here.
  • Henrich, Natalie, and Joseph Henrich. 2007. Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation. Oxford University Press. Cooperation explained through cultural transmission and kinship, with fieldwork among Chaldean Iraqis in Detroit. Not yet read here.
  • Bowles, Samuel. 2016. The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens. Yale University Press. When material incentives crowd out social motives, which matters for designing remedies. Not yet read here.
  • Turchin, Peter. 2016. Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Beresta Books. Group competition as the driver of large-scale cooperation. See Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety. Not yet read here.

Papers and books with their own notes

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  1. Patterns of collective action
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