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Collective Goods (collective + goods)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

Understanding the Unilateralist Turn in U.S. Foreign Policy

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 2 2005
David Skidmore
How should we explain the recent unilateralist turn in U.S. foreign policy? Some accounts treat growing American unilateralism as a passing aberration attributable to the neoconservative ideology of the Bush administration. This paper, by contrast, traces U.S. unilateralism to the structural effects, at home and abroad, of the end of the Cold War. Internationally, the removal of the Soviet threat has undermined the "institutional bargain" that once guided relations between the U.S. and its major allies. Absent Cold War imperatives, the U.S. is less willing to provide collective goods through strong international institutions and other states are less likely to defer to U.S. demands for special privileges that exempt the U.S. from normal multilateral constraints. Domestically, the end of the Cold War has weakened the ability of presidents to resist the appeals of powerful veto players whose interests are threatened by multilateral commitments. These factors suggest that American unilateralism may have deeper roots and more staying power than many expect. [source]

Intrinsic Motivation and the Logic of Collective Action: The Impact of Selective Incentives

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2010
Andreas P. Kyriacou
I integrate the notion of intrinsic motivation, applied to economics most notably by Frey (1997), into the logic of individual contributions toward collective goods as analyzed since Olson ([1965] 1971). This illuminates the many and various ways through which the intrinsic motivation to contribute toward such goods can be crowded out by the application of selective incentives. I suggest that the crowding-out effect increases the cost to society of organizing the provision of collective goods and argue in favor of designing selective incentives that mitigate this effect. [source]

Levy-funded research choices by producers and society

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL & RESOURCE ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2004
Julian M. Alston
Commodity levies are used increasingly to fund producer collective goods such as research and promotion. In the present paper we examine theoretical relationships between producer and national benefits from levy-funded research, and consider the implications for the appropriate rates of matching government grants, applied with a view to achieving a closer match between producer and national interests. In many cases the producer and national optima coincide. First, regardless of the form of the supply shift, when product demand is perfectly elastic, or all the product is exported, domestic benefits and costs of levy-funded research all go to producers and they have appropriate incentives. Second, if research causes a parallel supply shift, the producer share of research benefits is the same as their share of costs of a levy, and their incentives are compatible with national interests. In such cases, a matching grant would cause an over-investment in research from a national perspective. However, if demand is less than perfectly elastic, and research causes a pivotal supply shift, the producer share of benefits is smaller than their share of costs of the levy, and they will under-invest in research from a national point of view. A matching grant can be justified in such cases, however the magnitude of the optimal grant is sensitive to market conditions. [source]

The Logic of Expressive Collective Action: When will Individuals ,Nail their Colours to the Mast'?

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 4 2007
Philip Jones
Individuals do not act collectively simply because they recognise common interests; collective interests can be defined as collective goods and collective goods are non-excludable. In ,large' groups instrumental individuals have no incentive to act because individual action is imperceptible. But are individuals always this instrumental? If it is a mistake to assume that collective action occurs ,naturally' when common interests are recognised, it is a mistake to ignore awareness of common interests. Individuals derive satisfaction from expressing identity with common interests but when will individuals choose to ,nail their colours to the mast'? [source]