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Analyzing collective action
Author(s) -
Ostrom Elinor
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.29
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1574-0862
pISSN - 0169-5150
DOI - 10.1111/j.1574-0862.2010.00497.x
Subject(s) - collective action , affect (linguistics) , reciprocity (cultural anthropology) , action (physics) , reputation , enforcement , positive economics , economics , microeconomics , political science , sociology , social psychology , psychology , law , physics , communication , quantum mechanics , politics
Collective‐action problems pervade all societies as well as ecological systems used by humans. Substantial evidence has accrued during the last several decades that human actors are able to solve some (but definitely not all) collective‐action problems on their own without external rules and enforcement imposed from the outside. In this article, I review some of the structural variables that have been found to affect the likelihood of collective action. Then, I address the need to base future work on collective action on a more general theory of human behavior than has been used to model collective action over the last five decades. In the last section, I discuss how structural variables affect the core relationships of reputation, trust, and reciprocity as these affect levels of cooperation.