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Atiram on Collective Bargaining & Collective Action

By Lawrence Solum

Barak Atiram (Tel Aviv University) has posted Freeloaders and Blind Riders: Collective Bargaining & the Challenge of Conscious Collaboration on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

When the products of collective actions, organized by government agencies or private players, are non-excludable, individuals? incentive to invest their time, energy and money in it reduces. This problem, known as free riding, is commonly perceived in bargaining theory, as a transaction cost which can lead to a cooperation breakdown and prevent market efficient resource allocation. It also drew wide implications in the areas of social science, political philosophy and legal theory of the commons.

One of its immediate deductions is the perception of public nonattendance and even indifference to any collective action which aims for non-excludable collective goods. It is also served as an excuse exempting collective actions, governmental or private, from being transparent and open for public collaboration.

Differing from common grasp on collective action, the project at hand questions the ?free rider? logic and criticizes its over-reaching conclusions. Every collective good, conceived in governmental offices or individuals? aspirations, begins with a collective process. This intermediary phase is based upon selecting and eliminating competing alternatives along with their distributive outcomes. While the end result might be non-excludable, as the highway connecting the periphery to the center, the process of choosing the highway route entails competing alternatives which are of interest to all.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on December 24, 2009 (boomark / email).