ABSTRACT
As social animals, all of us, on numerous occasions during our everyday lives, take part in collective actions based on the welfare of our family, clan, the nation, or our specie that come directly in conflict with our short-term self-interest. Yet, unfortunately, despite its impressive performance as an analytical tool for many market and nonmarket actions, the tools of neoclassical economics and the public-choice school of political science and sociology offer but inadequate explanations of an individual’s decision to participate in a collective action. Because much of the preoccupation of political science and sociology revolves around people’s collective actions, this is an important question. I argue that the history of epistemological evolution of economics is rooted deeply in the demand and supply of physical commodities. Because collective actions are often about benefits that have to be shared with the community regardless of the contributions of individual members, standard theories of neoclassical economics, in the final analysis, succumb to the logical quagmire of Olson’s paradox. Facing the “free-rider problem,” it fails to provide us with a satisfactory explanation for the demand for public goods. In this chapter, I have sought a fuller explanation for a rational actor’s motivation for joining a collective action by combining the elegance of economic analyses with the insights on group behavior drawn from the advances in social psychology.
