Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:15:16.906Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Increasing the Incentives for International Cooperation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Mancur Olson
Get access

Extract

I am happy to respond to the invitation to comment on Bruce Russett's and John Sullivan's most useful and sensible article. The concept of collective goods must play a starring role in any adequate theory of international organization and cooperation so there is every reason to encourage work of this kind. Russett's and Sullivan's article is, moreover, worthy of extension and criticism on many specific points. On some of these points I have minor technical (or in some cases expositional) criticisms. But relevant as such technical issues can be, they attract only a specialized interest and are of far less practical importance than Russett's and Sullivan's central concern with the conditions under which more international collective goods can be obtained. They ask, in effect, how patterns of international organization and cooperation that could help to improve the inefficient, and at times even chaotic and violent, international system could in practice be attained.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , fall 1971 , pp. 866 - 874
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1971

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 One technical problem, though it comes up only in a footnote, is nonetheless so important that it should be mentioned. In their footnote 9 Russett and Sullivan seem to agree with the argument that “the apparent effect of size cannot be deduced merely from the principles of rationality and self-interest.” This conclusion is demonstrably incorrect if (as I infer from the context) it refers to the lesser likelihood that large groups will be able to meet their needs for collective goods through voluntary action. It is obvious that the larger a group, other things being equal, the smaller the share of the benefits that will accrue to any individual through his effort to provide a collective good. Thus, the larger the group the greater the relative importance of the externality of group-oriented action and the greater the departure from Parcto-optimality for the group. Moreover, apart from a special case I discussed some time ago (see my The Logic of Collective Action: Political Goods and the Theory of Groups [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965], pp. 48–49, footnote 68) it can be demonstrated that even the provision of a minimal amount of a collective good is less likely in large groups than in small ones when behavior is rational and self-interested.

2 Olson, Mancur Jr, and Zeckhauser, Richard, “An Economic Theory of Alliances,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 08 1966 (Vol. 48, No. 3), pp. 266–279CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and by the same authors, “Collective Goods, Comparative Advantage, and Alliance Efficiency,” in Issues in Defense Economics, ed. McKean, Roland N. (National Bureau of Economic Research, Universities-National Bureau Conference Series, No. 20) (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1967), pp. 25–48Google Scholar.

3 Quote is from Olson, , The Logic of Collective Action, p. 29.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., pp. 30–31.