The Communal Resource: Transaction Costs and the Solution of Collective Action Problems

Politics & Society

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 1993, Pages 195-214

  Taylor, Michael ^a   Singleton, Sara ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 21144469257     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329293021002004     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. The locus classicus for transaction costs is R. H. Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,”Journal of Law and Economics 3 (1960): 1-44. For the tripartite formulation used here, see Carl J. Dahlman, “The Problem of Externality,”Journal of Law and Economics 22 (1979): 141-62; and Carl J. Dahlman, The Open Field System and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. 79-86.
2. See Joseph M. Grieco, Cooperation Among Nations: Europe, America, and Non-Tariff Barriers to Trade (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). But for a more satisfactory theoretical treatment of the effects of “positionalism” in international relations, see Duncan Snidal, “Relative Gains and the Pattern of International Cooperation,”American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 701-26.
3. For a detailed account of a good example (the Law of the Sea negotiations on marine pollution), see R. Michael McGonigle and Mark Zacher, Pollution Politics and International Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). For some other examples and general discussion of the problem, see Oran R. Young, International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
4. See Douglas D. Heckathorn and Steven M. Maser, “Bargaining and the Sources of Transaction Costs: The Case of Government Regulation,”Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 3 (1987): 69-98; and Jules L. Coleman, Douglas D. Heckathorn, and Steven M. Maser, “A Bargaining Theory Approach to Default Provisions and Disclosure Rules in Contract Law,”Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 12 (1989): 639-709. As we hope is apparent, our approach is much indebted to the work of these three writers. We build also on Taylor's arguments about the role of community in facilitating conditional cooperation in supergames and making possible the maintenance of social order in the absence of the state; these arguments are here extended and recast in the language of transaction costs. See Michael Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation (London: Wiley, 1976), and Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
5. See Michael Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
6. This account of community modifies the one given in Taylor in Community, Anarchy and Liberty in the light of the discussion of “close-knit groups” in Robert C. Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
7. On uncertainty as the source of transaction costs, see Dahlman, “The Problem of Externality,” and The Open Field System, 80-84; and Coleman, Heckathorn, and Maser, “A Bargaining Theory Approach,” esp. 679-75.
8. It may be useful to remind readers of some things that have emerged from the study in the last fifteen years or so of the Prisoners' Dilemma supergame (the PD game indefinitiely iterated with discounting), which is one important but not the only applicable model of the CAP. Three things of relevance here have emerged. Very informally they are (1) if cooperation among all or some players is to be an equilibrium it must involve conditional cooperation—which of course requires monitoring of others' actions; (2) the rates at which players discount future payoffs are crucial: for cooperation, discounting must not be too great; and (3) when cooperation is an equilibrium, there are many other equilibria too. Thus anything that tends to produce low discount rates and easier monitoring helps, as does anything—like community-sanctioned norms—which coordinates the players' choices so as to pick out one of the equilibria corresponding to mutual cooperation.
9. The effects of heterogeneity on transaction costs have been noted by Richard A. Posner, “A Theory of Primitive Society, With Special Reference to Law,”Journal of Law and Economics 23 (1980): 1-53, at 44; and Ronald N. Johnson and Gary D. Libecap, “Contracting Problems and Regulation: The Case of the Fishery,”American Economic Review 72 (1982): 1005-22; as well as by Coleman, Heckathorn, and Maser, “A Bargaining Theory Approach.” See also Gary D. Libecap, Contracting for Property Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
10. See, for example, Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
11. Examples can be found in James A. Acheson, “The Lobster Fiefs Revisited: Economic and Ecological Effects of Territoriality in Maine Lobster Fishing,” in Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson, eds., The Question of the Commons (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987)
12. John R. Bowman, Capitalist Collective Action: Competition, Cooperation and Conflict in the Coal Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
13. Ellickson, Order Without Law.
14. For examples of the real thing, see Evelyn Pinkerton, ed., Cooperative Management of Local Fisheries (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989).
15. An important start on modeling such structures is made in Jonathan Bendor and Dilip Mookherjee, “Institutional Structure and the Logic of Ongoing Collective Action,”American Political Science Review 81 (1987): 129-54. Further formal efforts would be useful.
16. A fourth application we could point to—but one of a rather different sort—is to collective action in rebellions, strikes, protests, and social movements. Here, of course, the participants cannot have recourse to the state, which is usually the object of their collective action. In many peasant rebellions, the peasant village community has been the preexisting organizational cell from which the rebellion was launched. In others, weak community had first to be strengthened by political entrepreneurs. The enabling role of community in peasant rebellion is considered in Michael Taylor, “Rationality and Revolutionary Collective Action,” in Michael Taylor, ed., Rationality and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
17. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
18. For a fuller account of the reasons for our judgments about the relative strength of community in these cases, see Sara Singleton and Michael Taylor, “Common Property, Collective Action, and Community,”Journal of Theoretical Politics 4 (1992): 309-24.
19. See especially Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence, 2d ed. (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1989).
20. See Michael D. McGinnis, “Issue Linkage and the Evolution of International Cooperation,”Journal of Conflict Resolution 30 (1986): 141-70; and Peter H. Sand, “International Cooperation: The Environmental Experience,” in Jessica Tuchman Mathews, ed., Preserving the Global Environment (New York: Norton, 1991).
21. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study in World Order (London: Macmillan, 1977), 16-19.
22. For a good discussion of these actors in this context, see Michael D. McGinnis and Elinor Ostrom, “Design Principles for Local and Global Commons” (Paper presented at Conference on “Linking Local and Global Commons” at Harvard Center for International Affairs, April 23-25, 1992).