CONCLUSION
This chapter compared Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action to the Prisoner’s Dilemma analysis of collective action failure to argue that the game theoretic approach is both unprecedented and counterintuitive.
Throughout modernity, debate among economists and political theorists has been over the proper role of the state: Should it be restricted to sustaining property rights through a system of commutative justice backed by police enforcement, or should it play a redistributive role in ensuring citizens’ economic security as a necessary component of securing their self-preservation? Throughout modernity, theorists accepted that if the government could offer public goods in the form of security and infrastructure that did not depend on redistribution any more than providing police and justice did, then this role for government was not in and of itself problematic.[584] Olson weighed into this debate acknowledging the rationality of cooperating with small or medium ventures in which what one contributed in costs was outmatched by what one gained in distributions. However, he argued that for very large groups approximating perfect market competition, individuals could not be instrumentally motivated to contribute because, by definition, no one’s single contribution could make any appreciable difference on either the collective outcome or individual shares.Olson argued that this lack of causal impact in large-scale ventures necessarily impedes all actors, those motivated by moral or other-regarding considerations as well as those motivated by narrow self-interest. Game theorists have assumed that two-person cooperation involving scarce resources is a Prisoner’s Dilemma game and can be extended from two individuals to a large number of individuals, each of whom most prefers for every other agent to cooperate while making an exception for himself.
Yet this PD analysis of collective action and free riding misses the crux of Olson’s argument. For Olson, group size matters. According to his analysis, the reason very large groups are bound to have a difficult time securing cooperation, even if those actors are motivated by side constraints or concerns for others’ well-being, is individuals’ perception that their efforts make no causal impact on whether the collective undertaking succeeds or fails. Hence, Olson’s Logic of Collective Action serves to draw attention to collective action failure as a result of the logic of negligibility rather than everyone’s first preference to free ride. Olson does not suggest that the Prisoner’s Dilemma model of collective action is necessarily inaccurate because if all actors did most prefer to defect from contributing yet collected gain from others’ efforts, then collective action must fail. His particular genius though lies in showing us how the fact of causal negligibility in large group settings will by itself provide a significant challenge to successful participation.We can surmise the following points:
1. If the Prisoner’s Dilemma model, and the assumptions on which it relies to resist a satisfactory mutually beneficial solution (only outcomes with salient fungible properties matter to agents, gratuitous altruism contradicts instrumental rationality, and joint maximization and commitment are incoherent) accurately characterize two-person exchange and common resource dilemmas, then it would seem accurate to conclude by implication that individuals with these preferences and predicaments will end up in a large-scale collective action referred to as the tragedy of the commons.
2. However, whether or not the PD is relevant to two-person interactions, its causal logic holding that individuals acquire gain by offsetting costs onto others, as is the case if one individual suckers the other, is not the key to understanding large-scale collective action failure of the sort analyzed by Mancur Olson.
3. Drawing attention to the long-standing field-wide centrality of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is not meant to diminish its ability to serve as a useful analytic model for understanding some dimensions of shared resource dilemmas. Analyzing economic problems in detail in terms of their instrumental impact is a worthwhile exercise, and noncooperative game theory may play a constructive role. However, it is possible that the idealized assumptions necessary for operationalizing the models become interpreted as strategic imperatives on par with the Kantian means-ends hypothetical imperative, and yet exceed its restricted status by being treated as the sole standard for rational action. In this case either the demands of modeling have overstepped the boundary of playing a descriptive role to serving as a normative guideline for individual decision making and a prescriptive role for policy analysis, or theorists are projecting their own attitudes onto those being modeled.61
4. Therefore, in teaching both the Prisoner’s Dilemma model of two or small numbers of actors and the large-scale collective action problem, thoroughness requires clarifying the assumptions structuring strategic rationality, and their potential role in fostering neoliberal subjectivity and designing neoliberal institutions. Large-scale collective action and public goods, like perfect competition in the free market, fall outside the PD model because they are characterized by every individual’s causally negligible role in making any appreciative difference to himself or anyone else by contributing. There is no instrumental reason to contribute to a collective action, whether or not an individual has the disposition consistent with strategic rationality to free ride.
61 On Kant’s hypothetical imperative, which exists alongside his categorical imperative, see Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed, and trans, by John Ladd (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
5. Distinguishing between the motivational complex and challenges leading to a suboptimal outcome in a Prisoner’s Dilemma and in a vast collective venture is crucial for satisfactorily addressing this predicament and tragedy. The neoliberal action consistent with noncooperative game theory may become increasingly normalized if the tragedy of the commons is viewed as the outcome of a population of hopeful free riders each of whom most prefer to be the lone defector. Moreover possibly the tragedy of the commons may at least in part be an outcome of resignation and frustration that not even the usual avenues of joint effort, commitment, and other-regarding action are sufficient to make a noticeable difference in the globally realized outcome.