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Collective Action Cascades: An Informational Rationale for the Power in Numbers
Author(s) -
Lohmann Susanne
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
journal of economic surveys
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.657
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 1467-6419
pISSN - 0950-0804
DOI - 10.1111/1467-6419.00128
Subject(s) - rationalization (economics) , collective action , irrational number , economics , action (physics) , information cascade , microeconomics , mechanism (biology) , positive economics , psychology , social psychology , cognitive psychology , epistemology , political science , philosophy , physics , geometry , mathematics , quantum mechanics , politics , law
Self‐interested individuals pursue their goals rationally taking into account the constraints imposed by their environment and best‐responding to the strategic behavior of other individuals: when applied to collective action, economic theory predicts undersupply. Meanwhile, the behavior of masses of people is described as excitable, emotional, irrational, suggestible, hypnotic, disorderly, and unpredictable: in practice, it seems, collective action is oversupplied, and erratically so. The contagious and volatile dynamics of collective action appear to defy rationalization. I conceptualize a social movement as a dynamic informational cascade. Turbulencies emerge endogenously from rational individual behavior. Disorderly mass behavior is a by‐product of a powerful decentralized mechanism of information aggregation.