Which Public Goods Are Endangered?: How Evolving Communication Technologies Affect The Logic of Collective Action.

The theory in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action is built from historically uncontroversial assumptions about interpersonal communication. Today, evolving technologies are changing communication dynamics in ways that invalidate some of these once uncontroversial assumptions. How do these changes affect Olson's thesis? Using research tools that were not available to Olson, we differentiate collective actions that new communication technologies help from the endeavors that they hurt. In the process, we refine some of Olson's best-known ideas. For example, we find that evolving communication technologies eliminate many of the organizational advantages that Olson attributed to small groups. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers