Cooperation and Collective Action

Week 13 · Society, Power & Collective Action

Why shared interests do not automatically produce coordinated action.

Time to set aside
6-8 hours: 2 hours reading, 1 hour strategic model, 2 hours case analysis, 1 hour synthesis.
Progress
Ready to begin

Your AI study mentor

Sofia's briefing

Why this week

A group can share an interest and still fail to act together. Free riding, mistrust, unequal costs, weak information, and poor enforcement can turn a common benefit into an individual dilemma. I return to strategic reasoning at a larger scale because shared interests alone do not explain collective outcomes; the actor map makes costs, information, and power visible before solutions are proposed.

What to watch for

Do not diagnose failed cooperation as a lack of solidarity until you have examined who pays, who benefits, and whether the rule is credible.

Who bears the cost of cooperating first, and what reason do they have to trust the others?

  1. 1
    Orient

    Start with the aims and questions so the readings have a purpose.

  2. 2
    Read actively

    Use the prompt under each source to produce notes, not highlights alone.

  3. 3
    Apply

    Test the ideas through observation, analysis, or a small intervention.

  4. 4
    Demonstrate

    Save the deliverables and check your work against the completion criteria.

Questions and aims

Define what you are trying to understand before deciding that you have understood it.

Study Aims

  • Distinguish a private benefit from a shared or spillover benefit.
  • Explain free riding and collective-action failure.
  • Identify trust, monitoring, enforcement, and legitimacy as separate problems.
  • Propose an intervention at the level of incentives, norms, or institutions.

Guiding Questions

  • Who benefits if cooperation succeeds?
  • Who can free ride, and who bears the cost of contributing?
  • What makes a cooperative rule credible and legitimate?

Before you read

Return to your Module 2 payoff matrix while reading. Track what changes when strategic logic scales from two people to a society.

Core material

Reading plan

4 guided readings, in the order shown.

  2. 60 min

    Game Theory Opens in new tab

    Robert Aumann and Sergiu Hart · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

    Why it earns a place

    An overview of strategic interaction, rational choice, equilibrium, and the limits of purely individual reasoning.

    How to study it

    Return to the sections on repeated games. Identify how repetition, reputation, and punishment change your case.

  3. 45 min

    Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract Opens in new tab

    Fred D'Agostino, Gerald Gaus, and John Thrasher · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

    Why it earns a place

    How political obligation, legitimacy, cooperation, and mutually acceptable rules are understood through social-contract traditions.

    How to study it

    Read the sections on mutual advantage and public justification. Record what a legitimate cooperative rule would need to show.

  4. 75-90 min

    Governing the Commons Opens in new tab

    Elinor Ostrom · Cambridge University Press

    Why it earns a place

    Ostrom's empirical and institutional analysis of how communities govern common-pool resources without relying only on markets or central command.

    How to study it

    Read chapter 3 and one case chapter. Compare Ostrom's empirical approach with the abstract payoff matrix from this week.

Apply and demonstrate

7 study actions turn the reading into observable work.

Practice

  1. Choose your persistent collective problem and make an actor map with at least five actors.
  2. For each actor, list benefit, cost, information, power, and likely action.
  3. Write the smallest game that captures the problem.
  4. Design one voluntary and one mandatory intervention. Compare feasibility, fairness, and enforcement.

Deliver

  • An actor and incentive map.
  • A collective-action diagnosis of 500-700 words.
  • A two-option intervention comparison.

Confirm

  • You have shown why cooperation is difficult, not just asserted that people lack solidarity.
  • Your proposal identifies who monitors and who bears enforcement costs.
  • You can state a legitimacy concern about your preferred intervention.

Additional Resources

Optional resources for going further after the reading plan.