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Essay Archive - Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action
Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action
In 1965 an intellectual bomb was dropped on the field of interest groups, in the form of Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action. In this seminal work Olson details the dynamics of group formation. The central theory is that men and women are rational, correspondingly they maximize benefits and minimize costs; because of this rationality people will not join in collective action unless induced to do so by incentives. A corollary to the central theory presented is the “by-product” theory. The by-product theory states,
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