Article: 'A behavioral approach to the rational choice theory of collective action: presidential address, American Political Science Association, 1997.

Let me start with a provocative statement. You would not be reading this article if it were not for some of our ancestors learning how to undertake collective action to solve social dilemmas. Successive generations have added to the stock of everyday knowledge about how to instill productive norms of behavior in their children and to craft rules to support collective action that produces public goods and avoids "tragedies of the commons."(1) What our ancestors and contemporaries have learned about engaging in collective action for mutual defense, child rearing, and survival is not, however, understood or explained by the extant theory of collective action.

Yet, the ...

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