The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Harvard Economic Studies, Volume 124)
Mancur Olson Jr.
Language: English
Pages: 199
ISBN: B018O98ZB4
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book develops an original theory of group and organizational behavior that cuts across disciplinary lines and illustrates the theory with empirical and historical studies of particular organizations. Applying economic analysis to the subjects of the political scientist, sociologist, and economist, Mancur Olson examines the extent to which the individuals that share a common interest find it in their individual interest to bear the costs of the organizational effort.
The theory shows that most organizations produce what the economist calls “public goods”—goods or services that are available to every member, whether or not he has borne any of the costs of providing them. Economists have long understood that defense, law and order were public goods that could not be marketed to individuals, and that taxation was necessary. They have not, however, taken account of the fact that private as well as governmental organizations produce public goods.
The services the labor union provides for the worker it represents, or the benefits a lobby obtains for the group it represents, are public goods: they automatically go to every individual in the group, whether or not he helped bear the costs. It follows that, just as governments require compulsory taxation, many large private organizations require special (and sometimes coercive) devices to obtain the resources they need.
This is not true of smaller organizations for, as this book shows, small and large organizations support themselves in entirely different ways. The theory indicates that, though small groups can act to further their interest much more easily than large ones, they will tend to devote too few resources to the satisfaction of their common interests, and that there is a surprising tendency for the “lesser” members of the small group to exploit the “greater” members by making them bear a disproportionate share of the burden of any group action.
All of the theory in the book is in Chapter 1; the remaining chapters contain empirical and historical evidence of the theory’s relevance to labor unions, pressure groups, corporations, and Marxian class action.
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small group in which a member gets such a large fraction of the total benefit that he would be better off if he paid the entire cost himself, rather than go without the good, there is some presumption that the collective good will be provided. In a group in which no one member got such a large benefit from the collective good that he had an interest in providing it even if he had to pay all of the cost, but in which the individual was still so important in terms of the whole group that his
anything toward obtaining the collective good. Each could refuse to help provide the collective good on the mistaken assumption that the others would provide it without him. It does not seem very likely that all of the members of the group would go on making this mistake permanently, however. 71. UThe character of the numerically intermediate structure, therefore, can be explained as a mixture of both: so that each of the features of both the small and large group appears in the intermediate
Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. Talcott Parsons and A. M. Henderson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 318. 6 The Logic of Collective Action But organizations often perish if they do nothing to further the interests of their members, and this factor must severely limit the number of organizations that fail to serve their members. The idea that organizations or associations exist to further the interests of their members is hardly novel, nor peculiar to economics;
oppose the union shop on the ground that it denies the "right to work." For if, under all circumstances, the individual has a "right to work" (the right to work without paying union dues), surely he must have the "right not to fight" (the right to avoid military service), and the "right to spend" (the right to avoid paying taxes for government services he does not want). Collective bargaining, war, and the basic governmental services are alike in that the "benefits" of all three go to everyone in
would usually tend to defeat the smaller, narrower, special interest. He considers a situation in which a relatively small group of team owners with heavy wagons are tending to damage the public roads in a town to the detriment of the majority of the taxpayers and citizens in the town. Bentley asserts that eventually the interest of the larger number will win out over the special interests of the minority: the mass of taxpayers is "bound to win" eventually and require wider tires for the