IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oxf/wpaper/190.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Evolution of Collective Action

Author

Listed:
  • David P. Myatt
  • Chris Wallace

Abstract

A public good is produced if and only if a team of m or more volunteers contribute to it. An equilibrium-selection problem leads to the questions: will collective action succeed? If so, who will participate in the team? The paper studies the evolution of collective action: as part of a strategy-revision process, updating players choose quantal responses to existing play. With symmetric players, success depends upon the cost of contribution, the benefit from provision, and the critical team-size m; the relative variability of costs and benefits, and their correlation, are also critical. When players differ, successful teams consist of either the most efficient contributors, or those with the most idiosyncratic preferences. The addition of a single bad apple (for instance, an individual whose costs are particularly variable) to a population in which a successful team operates may result in destabilisation: over time, the bad apple might supplant an existing contributor, prompting a collapse.

Suggested Citation

  • David P. Myatt & Chris Wallace, 2005. "The Evolution of Collective Action," Economics Series Working Papers 190, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:190
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9effcb85-eddf-4f32-ad25-69df531de62a
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Blume Lawrence E., 1995. "The Statistical Mechanics of Best-Response Strategy Revision," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 111-145, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Maria Manuela Castro Silva, 2006. "Collective Action-A Challenge and an Opportunity for Water Governance," ERSA conference papers ersa06p659, European Regional Science Association.
    2. Makris, Miltiadis, 2009. "Private provision of discrete public goods," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 292-299, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Michael Kosfeld, 2002. "Stochastic strategy adjustment in coordination games," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 20(2), pages 321-339.
    2. Zhang, Boyu & Hofbauer, Josef, 2016. "Quantal response methods for equilibrium selection in 2×2 coordination games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 19-31.
    3. Kosfeld, Michael, 2002. "Why shops close again: An evolutionary perspective on the deregulation of shopping hours," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 51-72, January.
    4. Sornette, Didier & Zhou, Wei-Xing, 2006. "Importance of positive feedbacks and overconfidence in a self-fulfilling Ising model of financial markets," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 370(2), pages 704-726.
    5. Blume,L.E. & Durlauf,S.N., 2005. "Identifying social interactions : a review," Working papers 12, Wisconsin Madison - Social Systems.
    6. Hsiao-Chi Chen & Yunshyong Chow & Li-Chau Wu, 2013. "Imitation, local interaction, and coordination," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 42(4), pages 1041-1057, November.
    7. Stephen Morris & Hyun Song Shin, 2003. "Heterogeneity and Uniqueness in Interaction Games," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1402, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    8. Giorgio Fagiolo & Marco Valente, 2005. "Minority Games, Local Interactions, and Endogenous Networks," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 25(1), pages 41-57, February.
    9. Suren Basov, 2002. "Evolution of Social Behavior in the Global Economy: The Replicator Dynamics with Migration," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 847, The University of Melbourne.
    10. López-Pintado, Dunia, 2008. "Diffusion in complex social networks," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 573-590, March.
    11. Robert Axtell, 2007. "What economic agents do: How cognition and interaction lead to emergence and complexity," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 20(2), pages 105-122, September.
    12. Cowan, Robin, 2004. "Network models of innovation and knowledge diffusion," Research Memorandum 016, Maastricht University, Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).
    13. Carlos Alós-Ferrer & Georg Kirchsteiger & Markus Walzl, 2010. "On the Evolution of Market Institutions: The Platform Design Paradox," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 120(543), pages 215-243, March.
    14. Oyama, Daisuke & Takahashi, Satoru, 2015. "Contagion and uninvadability in local interaction games: The bilingual game and general supermodular games," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 100-127.
    15. La Ferrara, Eliana & Gulesci, Selim & Jindani, Sam & Smerdon, David & Sulaiman, Munshi & Young, H. Peyton, 2021. "A Stepping Stone Approach to Understanding Harmful Norms," CEPR Discussion Papers 15776, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    16. Hellmann, Tim & Staudigl, Mathias, 2014. "Evolution of social networks," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 234(3), pages 583-596.
    17. H. Peyton Young & Mary A. Burke, 2001. "Competition and Custom in Economic Contracts: A Case Study of Illinois Agriculture," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(3), pages 559-573, June.
    18. Cartwright, Edward, 2003. "Imitation and the Emergence of Nash Equilibrium Play in Games with Many Players," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 684, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    19. Côme Billard, 2020. "Technology Contagion in Networks," Working Papers 2020.01, FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
    20. H Peyton Young & Lucas Merrill Brown, 2016. "The Diffusion of a Social Innovation: Executive Stock Options from 1936," Economics Series Working Papers 777, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Collective Action; Evolution; Teams; Equilibrium Selection; Exponential Cost; Rooted Trees.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:190. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Anne Pouliquen (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfeixuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.