Collective Action and Prisoner's Dilemma

Two major analytical traditions have contributed to the understanding of the problem of collective action: the theory of public goods and game theory. The theory of public goods is the older tradition. Almost exclusively European in its beginning, it culminated in a few pages of notation and comments by Paul Samuelson that have been the centerpiece of discussion since their appearance in the mid-fifties. ¹ Olson’s statement in The Logic of Collective Action is ostensibly based on Samuelson’s analysis. Game theory took form between 1940 and 1942, appearing virtually whole from the minds of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. ² In some respects, the theory per se has been less important than the framework on which it was constructed—a framework that has come to dominate even verbal accounts of social interaction. That framework (specifically, the form in which individual games are represented, especially the payoff matrix, described in this chapter) has influenced much of subsequent social psychological research, one of whose most important strains has been work in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which was invented in about 1950 by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. ³