Collective Action and Cooperation Wiki
A knowledge base on realising opportunities for coordination and collective action - and understanding why it can be hard
When groups of people — or nations, or organisations — could all be better off by working together, why do they so often fail to do so? And when coordination is possible, what makes it happen?
These are among the most consequential questions of our time. The opportunities for collective action are vast: agreements that could prevent catastrophic wars, institutions that could stabilise a changing climate, governance structures that could ensure powerful technologies benefit everyone rather than destabilise the world. The gains from cooperation are real and often enormous.
Yet we consistently fall short. Individually rational choices aggregate into collectively irrational outcomes. Shared resources get depleted. Global agreements collapse. Technologies race ahead of governance. The gap between what could be achieved through cooperation and what is achieved is one of the great tragedies of human organisation.
The Stag hunt and Prisoner's Dilemma are classic stories of the benefits of cooperation and why it can fail
This knowledge base explores both the opportunity and the failure. It will include game theory, economics, political science, and history and many examples. What are the cultures, worldviews and structures that make cooperation possible? What undermine it, and what are some of the possible things we can do to help make cooperation more likely?
The issues are urgent and wide-ranging: governing artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies, addressing climate change and managing environmental commons, preserving shared information ecosystems, building international institutions that actually work.
This is also the companion knowledge base for an upcoming course on collective action and cooperation – pre-register here https://luma.com/iydwcpau. Notes, concepts, and key ideas will be collected here and as the course develops as a living wiki.
Key themes
- Coordination and assurance: stag hunts, coordination games, when cooperation is possible and how to achieve it
- Social dilemmas: prisoner's dilemmas, tragedy of the commons, free-riding, and why individually rational behaviour produces collective harm
- Institutions and governance: how rules, norms, and organisations solve — or fail to solve — collective action problems
- Technology governance: AI, nuclear weapons, digital commons, and the challenge of governing powerful technologies
- Climate and environment: the defining global commons challenge of our era
- Designing for cooperation: mechanism design, trust-building, international agreements, and other tools for realising collective gains
