Example candidates — review index

Everything the six candidate hunts turned up: 176 candidates. One line each, grouped by list and section, so the whole set can be read in one pass.

See shortlist.md for the recommended cut and the criteria behind it. This file is the full database behind that — use it to answer "do we have more like this one".

Flags: [C] the account is contested or the fit is weak — read the entry before using. [M] strong media known, or a clip that stands alone. [?] a detail is unverified.

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Historical failures

Full list

Small groups

• The Maxi Trial and the breaking of omertà — The literal prisoner's dilemma, including the payoff structure the name comes from. Omertà is a cooperative equilibrium held in place by the…
• The Donner Party [C] — Small-group cooperation under acute scarcity, where the group was too large for a single family's loyalty to cover and lacked any authority able to…
• The trench truces of 1914–18 and their suppression [C] [?] — A repeated prisoner's dilemma solving itself through the shadow of the future between units that faced each other for months, and then being…
• The Nottinghamshire split in the 1984–85 miners' strike [C] [?] — Olson's problem in its original industrial form. The benefit of a won strike is a public good across the union; the cost falls on the individual…
• The Ik of Uganda — flagged as contested [C] [M] [?] — Turnbull's claim is that cooperation is a luxury that scarcity strips away — that the norms holding a society together are contingent on surplus. If…

Commons and resources

• The Grand Banks cod collapse [M] — Subtractable commons with poor observability and a large, partly foreign fleet. Also a failure of the science–politics interface: quota advice was…
• The Peruvian anchoveta collapse [M] — Open access followed by heavy overcapitalization — a fleet and processing capacity sized for a catch the stock could not sustain. The distinctive…
• Soviet illegal whaling and the IWC [M] — A treaty regime with agreed quotas and no adequate monitoring. Everything the diagnostic asks about observability fails at once: defection was…
• The near-extinction of the American bison [M] — Open-access slaughter with no property rights and no enforceable restraint, where each hunter's restraint would simply have left the animal for the…
• The passenger pigeon [M] — Open access again, with a twist worth the slide: the species appears to have required very large colonies to breed successfully, so harvesting pushed…
• The Dust Bowl [M] — Soil erosion is not confined to the field that caused it, so conservation on one farm is a public good for the neighborhood. With prices falling,…
• The Aral Sea [M] — Upstream–downstream river allocation, which became an international problem the moment the USSR dissolved in 1991 and a single planner's decision…
• Salinization in southern Mesopotamia [C] — Drainage is a public good across an irrigation system — one farmer's drainage benefits neighbors, one farmer's over-watering damages them — and the…
• Deforestation of Iceland [C] — Grazing on common land, with the twist that the damage is not to the grass but to tree regeneration — so nobody experiences the cost as their own…
• Rapa Nui / Easter Island — flagged as contested [C] — On the standard telling, a status competition between lineages that consumed the shared resource base — an arms race in statues. It is the single…
• Norse Greenland — flagged as contested [C] — On Diamond's account, elite incentives diverged from group survival: those who controlled the best farms had the least reason to change the system…

Alliances, treaties and arms races

• The Anglo-German naval race [C] — The textbook two-player arms race: mutual restraint dominates mutual building for both, and unilateral restraint is the worst outcome for whoever…
• The July Crisis and the mobilization schedules [C] — A security dilemma with a first-mover advantage, made worse by a technology — the mobilization timetable — that removed the option of waiting.…
• Collapse of the Washington Naval Treaty system — Worth using with the Anglo-German race because it shows cooperation actually achieved, with a specific mechanism — an observable, countable unit…
• The League of Nations over Manchuria and Abyssinia [M] — Collective security is a public good whose provision requires each member to bear a private cost — trade lost, war risked — to punish an aggressor…
• Smoot–Hawley and the tariff spiral [M] — Tariff setting is a prisoner's dilemma between states — mutual free trade beats mutual protection for both, unilateral opening is worst — and each…
• Bank runs in the Great Depression [M] — The purest coordination failure available, and structurally different from a prisoner's dilemma — the Diamond–Dybvig model has two equilibria, and…

Civic and civilizational

• Greek disunity and Philip II — Balancing against a rising power is a public good — everyone benefits if Philip is stopped, each city would rather someone else's hoplites did it —…
• The liberum veto and the partitions of Poland [C] — A unanimity rule is a decision technology, chosen to protect against tyranny of the majority, which has the property that the cost of blocking falls…
• Norm collapse in the late Roman Republic [C] [M] — Unwritten constitutional restraints are a public good sustained by everyone's expectation that everyone else will observe them. Once one player…
• The Great Leap Forward and the communes [C] [M] — Two failures stacked. The commune's remuneration system severed effort from reward at a group size far past where monitoring worked — Olson's problem…
• The Great Stink and London's sewers [M] — Sanitation is the standard public good — non-excludable, expensive, and with the benefit diffused across a population and across future decades. It…
• The 1953 North Sea flood — Flood defense is a public good with deferred, invisible benefits and immediate, visible costs — maintenance always loses budget arguments until it…

Historical successes

Full list

Commons governed over long periods

• Törbel, Valais, Switzerland — Subtractable commons, with the appropriation limit set by a proxy that is cheap to verify. The mechanism is **observability engineered into the rule…
• The huerta of Valencia and the Tribunal de las Aguas [C] — Subtractable commons with the classic upstream/downstream asymmetry. The mechanism is low-cost graduated sanctioning plus public shaming: the…
• Iriai forest commons, Japan [C] — Subtractable commons. The mechanism is synchronised harvesting as a monitoring device. If everyone cuts thatch on the same declared day, everyone…
• Balinese subak and the water temples [C] — A coordination problem rather than a dilemma, which makes it unusually useful for the course. The mechanism is **ritual as a synchronisation device…
• The zanjeras of Ilocos Norte, Philippines — The mechanism is making the free rider problem structurally impossible by aligning holdings. The usual failure in gravity irrigation is that…
• The Alanya inshore fishery, Turkey — Subtractable commons resolved by rotation, which converts a contest into a queue. Nobody has to be monitored by an authority: the fisher due at a…
• Maine lobster gangs [C] — The mechanism is graduated informal punishment that never has to reach the courts, layered under formal state rules the industry itself lobbied…
• Dutch water boards (waterschappen) — A public good where defection is fatal to everyone — one unmaintained dike section floods the whole polder. The mechanism is **assignment plus…
• The English open-field system [C] — This is the case Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" is usually taken to be about, and the historical record says the commons were stinted, not open…
• Los Angeles groundwater basins — This is Ostrom's own dissertation work and the empirical root of polycentricity. The mechanism is nesting: hundreds of independent pumpers were…
• Acequias of northern New Mexico — The mechanism is an annual obligatory work day that doubles as a membership test. Turning out for the limpia is the visible act that keeps a…

Trade, credit and mutual aid

• The Maghribi traders' coalition [C] — The mechanism on Greif's account is multilateral reputation — not "I will stop dealing with you", which is often too weak because the cheat can…
• The Champagne fairs and the law merchant [C] — The mechanism is a cheap information institution substituting for an enforcement institution. Reputation only punishes defection if news travels;…
• Medieval and early modern craft guilds [C] — Worth including chiefly for the selective incentives point — Olson's argument in the flesh. A guild supplies a public good (training, standards)…
• British friendly societies — The central problem is adverse selection and malingering — you cannot easily verify that a claimant is too ill to work. The mechanism is **local…
• Raiffeisen rural credit cooperatives — A credit market failing for lack of information about who is a good risk. The mechanism is **unlimited joint liability, which converts the lender's…
• The Rochdale Pioneers — The mechanism is the dividend on purchases — a selective incentive that ties a member's private return to their own loyalty to the shop, which is…
• Rotating savings and credit associations — The structural problem is that whoever receives the first pot has every reason to walk away. The mechanism is **repetition plus social collateral…
• The Hanseatic League [C] — A cooperating body with almost none of the apparatus of a state. The mechanism is collective boycott, backed by expulsion: a town that broke…
• Mondragón [C] — Worker cooperatives usually fail to scale because they cannot raise capital and cannot discipline shirking. The mechanism here is **internal capital…

Treaties and agreements

• The Montreal Protocol — The mechanism worth teaching is not goodwill but **a small number of producers, an available substitute, and trade restrictions against…
• The Antarctic Treaty — The mechanism is unrestricted mutual inspection, agreed at the height of the Cold War, plus the decision to freeze rather than settle the…
• Smallpox eradication — A global public good delivered while the two funders were pointing missiles at each other. Two mechanisms worth separating. First, **the good is…
• The Limited Test Ban Treaty — The instructive part is the failure that preceded it. A comprehensive ban was blocked on verification: underground tests could not then be…
• Cleaning up the Rhine — A textbook upstream–downstream externality where the upstream party has no incentive to act. The mechanism is **a focal disaster plus a simple,…

Cooperative labour

• Barn raising and the Amish frolic — A lumpy task nobody can do alone and nobody can be paid to do, in a community that rejects insurance. The mechanism is **a generalised obligation…
• Reciprocal labour institutions: ayni, minka, gotong royong, meitheal [C] — Useful for a specific analytical point: the difference between the balanced and the pooled forms. Ayni is a bilateral debt — you worked my…

Cooperation under war

• The live and let live system in the trenches — The best available natural experiment on repeated play. The mechanism is **an iterated prisoner's dilemma with reciprocity and a long shadow of the…
• The Christmas truce, 1914 [C] — Worth teaching as a focal point rather than as a warm story. The problem for two hostile lines is that stepping out first is fatal unless you…
• The Danish rescue, October 1943 [C] — A very large number of strangers had to act, each at real risk, with no organisation, no leader and no time. The mechanism is worth being honest…
• Le Chambon-sur-Lignon [C] — The interesting question is why concealment held when one informer could have ended it. The mechanism appears to be **a pre-existing minority…

Standards and infrastructure

• The Metre Convention — A pure coordination problem — the payoff comes from everyone using the same unit and nobody much cares which one, except that incumbents have sunk…
• Standard time and the prime meridian — Coordination again, with a visible distributional fight over which convention, which is the part usually left out. The mechanism is **a private…
• The International Telegraph Union and the Universal Postal Union — The UPU's mechanism is the elegant one. Settling accounts between every pair of countries for every letter is administratively impossible, so the UPU…
• Container shipping standards — A network good whose value to each adopter depends on how many others adopted, with incumbents holding incompatible proprietary designs. The…

Knowledge commons before the internet

• The Republic of Letters — A positive commons where the failure mode is undersupply — the individual incentive is to keep a discovery private until you can profit from it,…
• Philosophical Transactions and the invention of priority — This is the mechanism entry for positive commons and it deserves to be taught separately from the Republic of Letters. **Priority is a selective…
• The International Geophysical Year, 1957–58 — The mechanism is mirrored archives: rather than trusting the other side to share, each bloc held a full copy of the data, which removed the…

Warfare and cohesion

Full list

The phalanx: the structure of a line that holds

• The hoplite shield wall and the rightward drift — This is the structural heart of the section, and Thucydides supplies the mechanism himself. The shield covers its bearer's left side and overlaps the…
• The othismos dispute [C] — It matters for teaching because the two readings imply different mechanisms. On the orthodox reading, associated with Victor Davis Hanson, the rear…
• Marathon and Plataea [C] — The mechanism worth naming is conscription from a face-to-face community into the unit that fights. Athenian hoplites served by tribe (phylē),…
• Thermopylae, 480 BC [C] — The interesting part is the dismissal, not the last stand. A rearguard has an obvious free-rider structure — everyone is better off if someone stays…
• Socrates as a hoplite [C] — The mechanism is orderly withdrawal as a coordination problem, and it is the exact inverse of the rout entries below. Men who retreat in…
• The Sacred Band of Thebes [C] — An explicit, deliberate attempt to engineer cohesion by making the unit out of pre-existing bonds rather than hoping bonds form inside it.…
• The Plataean breakout, winter 428/427 BC — Two mechanisms in one short episode, and it is the best siege-and-sortie candidate on the list. First, **aggregation as a substitute for…

Manufacturing cohesion: Sparta and Rome

• The Spartan agoge [C] — The most thoroughgoing historical attempt to manufacture a primary group by destroying the competing one. Kin loyalty is the main rival to unit…
• The syssitia [C] — The best single Spartan entry, because the mechanism is unusually legible and does several jobs at once. **A daily attendance requirement is a cheap,…
• The tresantes — Spartan "tremblers" [C] — Punishment devolved to the whole population and made continuous. A death penalty for cowardice has to be administered by someone, costs the state…
• The Roman manipular legion [C] — A structural answer to the problem the phalanx has no answer to. In an unbroken line, the only exit is to run, and one man running can start a rout.…
• Decimation and the fustuarium [C] — Two distinct mechanisms, and separating them is the value of the entry. The fustuarium solves the **second-order free rider problem by conscripting…
• The sacramentum and the contubernium — Three layers of mechanism stacked deliberately. The oath is a commitment device with a religious cost — breaking it is sacrilege, not just…

Rout: the failure mode

• Ardant du Picq on why lines break [C] — The founding text of the whole subject, and it names the mechanism explicitly. Du Picq's argument is that battle is decided morally rather than…
• Where the casualties actually fall [C] — The number is the argument. If standing and fighting were what killed people, the two figures would be closer together. The gap exists because most…
• Caporetto, October 1917 [C] — The clearest modern illustration of the asymmetry du Picq describes, at industrial scale. The ratio of prisoners to dead is about 6 to 1, which is…

The modern small-unit literature

• Shils and Janowitz on primary groups in the Wehrmacht [C] — The founding modern statement of the mechanism, and the reason "primary group cohesion" entered the language. The claim is that men fight for roughly…
• Bartov's counter-argument: ideology and terror [C] — The direct challenge to the course's preferred mechanism, and it should be put in explicitly rather than avoided. If Bartov is right, cohesion under…
• S.L.A. Marshall's ratio of fire — discredited [C] — Include it, but as the thing that is wrong. It was for fifty years the most cited claim about combat behavior, it drove real changes in US Army…
• Grossman, On Killing [C] — Include it chiefly to be honest about the chain of citation. Grossman's central empirical support is Marshall's fire ratio, so the critique above…
• Task cohesion versus social cohesion [C] — The mechanism dispute that matters most for transferring any of this out of the military context. If cohesion runs on social bonds, it needs…
• Replacement systems: van Creveld's comparison [C] — A natural experiment on the Shils–Janowitz mechanism, run as policy. If cohesion is a property of stable small groups, then an individual replacement…

Mutiny: the collective action problem of the mutineers

• The French army mutinies, 1917 [C] — The cleanest case for the double structure, and the reason mutiny belongs in this course at all. Mutiny is a public good for the soldiers — everyone…
• The Russian army in 1917 and Order No. 1 [C] — The mutineers' coordination problem solved from the outside, by a document. A scattered army cannot mutiny because no unit knows whether others will…
• Spithead and the Nore, 1797 — Two mutinies a month apart with near-identical starting conditions and opposite outcomes, which makes it as close to a controlled comparison as this…
• Kiel, 1918, and Invergordon, 1931 [C] — Ships are the natural experiment for mutiny because a crew is a closed, permanently co-present group — high observability, no exit, forced repetition…

Conscription, free riding and who fights

• Substitution and commutation in the American Civil War [C] — A state that has identified a public good and then legislated a price for opting out of contributing to it. The numbers are the entry's value: given…
• Mercenary versus citizen armies: Machiavelli and the condottieri [C] — A named historical argument about exactly the mechanism this section is about — whether cohesion can be bought or has to be grown — and one where the…

Non-human cooperation

Full list

1. Musk oxen defensive circle

• The case [M] — Defense is a public good produced by joint effort, and it only exists above a participation threshold — a half-formed ring is worse than none. The…

2. Cape buffalo mobbing predators

• The case [M] — Mobbing is costly to the individual and the benefit is diffuse. The free-rider option — hang back, let others charge — is available and taken by many…

3. Meerkat sentinels — and why the standard telling is wrong

• The case [M] — It looks like a rota for a public good — costly personal vigilance, benefit shared. Clutton-Brock and colleagues found otherwise. Sentinels guard…

4. Fork-tailed drongos and the false alarm call

• The case [M] — An alarm-call system is a public good that runs on the credibility of the signal. The drongo is a free rider who has discovered that the good can be…

5. Vervet monkey alarm calls

• The case — Calling is the classic costly public good: the caller draws attention to itself and the benefit goes to everyone in earshot. The cost is real but…

6. Wolf pack hunting — and how little coordination it may require

• The case [M] — If roles are real, the animal taking the head position bears more risk than the flankers, and the question is what stops the flankers from hanging…

7. Lions: leaders, laggards and the absence of punishment

• The case [M] — Territorial defense is a public good with real risk attached and a straightforwardly available free ride. This is the case where the standard fix…

8. Orca wave-washing

• The case [M] — The wave cannot be produced alone; the minimum viable group is several animals swimming in synchrony, and the prey is then shared. It is a threshold…

9. Humpback bubble-net feeding

• The case [M] — A public good — the net — produced jointly, benefiting all participants, and impossible alone. Stable membership over decades is the shadow of the…

10. Chimpanzee cooperative hunting of red colobus

• The case [C] [M] — Meat is the payoff and it is divisible, so the question is whether hunters get more than non-hunters. At Taï, Boesch reports selective meat sharing…

11. Groupers and moray eels hunting together

• The case [M] — An interspecific mutualism with complementary rather than shared capabilities, so the joint output exceeds the sum of the parts. Neither animal…

12. Cleaner wrasse and their clients

• The case [M] — Mutualism with a large and continuous temptation to defect on both sides — the client could eat the cleaner, the cleaner could take the more…

13. Cleaner wrasse cheating, and what clients do about it

• The case [M] — The cleaner is a free rider on its own reputation. The mechanisms that hold it in check are exactly the ones the course names for humans: exit,…

14. Vampire bat blood sharing

• The case [C] — The textbook case of direct reciprocity in a non-human animal, and one where the asymmetric payoff makes the trade worthwhile — the donor gives up a…

15. Honeybee worker policing

• The case — The colony is not a harmonious superorganism; it is a group with a real internal conflict of interest that is suppressed by enforcement. A worker is…

16. Army ant living bridges

• The case [M] — The bridge is a public good made of the contributors themselves, and every ant in it is an ant not foraging. The colony solves a cost-benefit…

17. Naked mole-rats

• The case [M] — Complete reproductive self-abnegation by most of the group, which is as extreme as cooperation gets. It is held in place by a combination of high…

18. Dictyostelium: single cells building a body

• The case [M] — The cleanest case of a collective action problem with no brain, no communication in any meaningful sense, and an absolutely terminal cost to…

19. Dictyostelium cheater strains

• The case — This is the entry that does the most work in the whole file. A free rider in a system with no cognition, no intention, no culture and no morality.…

20. Pseudomonas siderophores: a public good and its cheats

• The case — A textbook public good — non-excludable, costly to produce, freely consumed — in a system of bacteria. The experimental result is the one the course…

21. Myxococcus xanthus developmental cheats

• The case — A second, independent instance of the same structure as entry 19, in a bacterium rather than an amoeba. Two unrelated lineages independently evolving…

22. Physarum network optimization

• The case [M] — A boundary case, and worth including for exactly that reason. There is no group here — it is one cell — so there is no free-rider problem at all, and…

23. Legume–rhizobium host sanctions

• The case — A mutualism between organisms with no shared interest whatever, stabilized by the host detecting under-performance and sanctioning it at the level of…

24. Acacia ants and the parasite of their mutualism

• The case [M] — A free rider in a two-species mutualism, and — more interestingly — a case where the host has counter-adaptations. The acacia's nectar is…

25. Honeyguides and human honey hunters

• The case [M] — A mutualism between a wild animal and humans that is unique among living species, and which runs on a learned signal on both sides. The division is…

Contemporary cases

Full list

Climate and atmosphere

• The Montreal Protocol — A global commons with a classic free-rider structure — each country's CFC emissions damage everyone's ozone layer, and unilateral abstention buys…
• The CFC-11 defection, 2013–2019 — The enforcement half of Montreal, tested live. A treaty with no inspectorate detected a violation from the atmosphere and the violation stopped…
• The Kigali Amendment — A climate agreement smuggled into an ozone treaty, and by some distance the most effective one. It works because it inherits Montreal's machinery —…
• The Kyoto Protocol — A global public good where the largest emitters faced the largest costs and the benefits accrued to everyone regardless. Failed as a global…
• The Paris Agreement — A deliberate architectural bet — that transparency, peer pressure and repeated review can substitute for enforcement. The result is neither the…
• The US Acid Rain Program — A commons problem — acid deposition — solved within one jurisdiction by a coercive cap plus a market in the residual. Useful precisely because it's…
• The global leaded petrol phase-out — A cross-border pollution problem with a race-to-the-bottom in fuel standards, resolved country by country rather than by treaty. Interesting because…

AI

• The frontier AI race — An arms race in Schelling's sense. The distinctive feature is that participants state the trap openly in their own founding documents, which makes it…
• AI summits and voluntary commitments — An attempt to build the cooperation infrastructure — common standards, mutual observation, a repeated meeting — in advance of any enforcement. The…
• The EU AI Act, and the regulatory-race question — A test of whether one jurisdiction can set a global floor — the Brussels effect — against a race to the bottom in which each jurisdiction has an…
• California SB 1047 and SB 53 [?] — A sub-national jurisdiction attempting to regulate an industry that can relocate, under explicit pressure that regulation would push developers out…

Weapons

• The Non-Proliferation Treaty — The best available evidence that a large-N security dilemma can be held for fifty years — and simultaneously the best evidence about what that costs,…
• The expiry of New START — A two-player repeated game with explicit verification, which has now lapsed. It's the cleanest small-N case in the course, and it just failed in real…
• The Biological Weapons Convention and the failed verification protocol — An agreement with near-universal membership, no observation and no punishment. It's the control condition for the diagnostic: what a treaty looks…
• Gain-of-function research and the self-imposed moratorium — A field trying to restrain itself, with the restraint applying only to one country's funding and not to the research anywhere else. The 1975 Asilomar…

Health

• Antimicrobial resistance — Two problems stacked. Overuse is a subtractable commons — every prescription and every kilogram fed to livestock depletes a shared resource.…
• COVAX and vaccine nationalism — Every government's dominant strategy was to secure doses for its own population first, and the collectively optimal allocation — vaccinating the…
• The WHO Pandemic Agreement — An attempt to fix the COVAX failure structurally — trading pathogen sample sharing, which developing countries supply, against vaccine access, which…

Fisheries and the ocean

• The Newfoundland cod collapse [C] — The canonical modern tragedy of the commons, with the additional detail that it happened inside a single country's 200-mile exclusive economic zone,…
• The IWC commercial whaling moratorium — A commons with an explicit opt-out clause written into the treaty. It shows what happens when defection is legal, observable and costs nothing — and…
• The WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies — A race to the bottom rather than a commons problem directly. Each state subsidizes its fleet to keep its share of a shrinking catch, and the…
• The High Seas Treaty (BBNJ) — The largest unowned commons on the planet, and the first instrument that lets anyone enclose parts of it. Too new to judge, which is worth saying…

Information commons and technical coordination

• Wikipedia — A positive commons — a public good that should be massively undersupplied by Olson's logic and is not. Understanding why it works matters more for…
• Open source infrastructure and the maintainer problem — A positive commons underprovided in the textbook pattern — every firm depends on it, none pays, and the free-riding is near-total. The xz case adds a…
• Y2K — Interdependent remediation — your systems are only safe if your suppliers' and your counterparties' systems are too, so the incentive to disclose…
• Internet standards: IPv6, DNSSEC, RPKI — Pure coordination problems with network externalities — deploying early costs you and benefits everyone else, and the benefit to you arrives only…
• Radio spectrum and the ITU — A subtractable commons where physics enforces rivalry — two transmitters on the same frequency in the same place destroy each other's signal.…

Economy and attention

• Tax havens and the global minimum tax — A textbook race to the bottom, with a clever structural fix — the top-up tax makes defection unprofitable for the haven, because the revenue is…
• Attention, social media and the under-16 age limit — Adolescent social media use is a collective action trap at the level of individuals — no teenager gains by leaving a platform their friends are on,…

Notes on coverage

Fiction and film

Full list

Betrayal under interrogation

• Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese) — The prisoner's dilemma in its original costume, with the detail the textbook leaves out — the payoff structure changes before the arrest does. Omertà…
• The Battle of Algiers (1966, Gillo Pontecorvo) — Two structures, and they are separable. First, organisational design against defection: the FLN cell is a pyramid in which each member knows only…
• Reservoir Dogs (1992, Quentin Tarantino) — Cooperation without a contract, under deliberately engineered anonymity. The colour-coded aliases are the same design move as the FLN pyramid —…
• The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) [M] — A one-shot two-player prisoner's dilemma with the payoff matrix stated out loud by the antagonist, which is rare and useful. It is worth being…

The holdout, and the group that will not act

• Twelve Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet) [M] — Two things at once, and separating them is the teaching value. The opening ballot is an information cascade — several jurors vote guilty because…
• Antigone (Sophocles, c. 441 BCE) [M] — The purest available statement of the volunteer's dilemma with no second volunteer. Antigone bears the entire cost of an act whose benefit — the…
• High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann) [M] — The inverse holdout, and the best example in cinema of a **public good that nobody will contribute to because everyone reasons correctly about their…
• An Enemy of the People (Henrik Ibsen, 1882) — An externality problem where the polluter and the victim are the same town, and the town votes to poison itself. The structure is a **collective…

The line that holds and the line that breaks

• Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick) — An assault is a threshold public good — it succeeds only if enough people go over the top, and the individual who goes when others do not simply…
• Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein) [M] — The cleanest threshold cascade on film. Everyone in the firing squad would prefer not to shoot; each of them knows that lowering his rifle alone…
• Spartacus (1960, Stanley Kubrick) — A costly signal that works by making identification impossible — each man's claim is individually irrational and fatal, and collectively it…
• Xenophon, Anabasis (c. 370 BCE) — An army that loses its command structure in a single night should dissolve — each man's best move is to negotiate his own terms or slip away, and the…
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (c. 400 BCE) — The shadow of the future removed, twice, by different mechanisms. In the plague, the discount rate goes to infinity because people expect to be…

Free riding, strikes and collective bargaining

• Germinal (Émile Zola, 1885) — Olson's problem in full, with all its parts on the page. A won strike is a public good across the workforce; the cost falls entirely on whoever…
• Norma Rae (1979, Martin Ritt) [M] — A threshold problem solved by a visible first mover. The union election requires a majority; every individual who signs risks their job; and the…
• Matewan (1987, John Sayles) — Coalition formation as the actual problem, which the strike literature usually skips. The company's strategy is not to defeat the union but to…
• Lysistrata (Aristophanes, 411 BCE) [M] — A cartel, and Aristophanes is unusually rigorous about it. The collective benefit requires universal compliance; each individual's defection is…

Commons, resources and externalities

• Wolf Totem (Jiang Rong, 2004) — A subtractable commons destroyed by the replacement of one governance regime with another, which is a more accurate description of most real…
• Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg) [M] — An externality and a coordination problem with a first-mover penalty, though the fit is looser than the film's reputation suggests. The mayor is…
• Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958) — Norm enforcement collapsing once exit becomes available. Every rule in the village is sustained by the certainty of collective sanction —…

Trust without verification

• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, John Huston) — A sustained trust game with no enforcement, and the film's great move is showing the institutional improvisation. They divide the gold into three…
• Lagaan (2001, Ashutosh Gowariker) — Recruitment into a costly collective enterprise where the downside is shared whether or not you play — the tax falls on everyone — and the effort is…

Disaster, pandemic and the bystander

• The Plague (Albert Camus, 1947) — Voluntary provision of a public good under real personal risk, treated without heroics — Camus is explicit that joining the squads should not be…
• Contagion (2011, Steven Soderbergh) — Three distinct structures, which is why it is worth a slot despite being uneven. Free riding on a fear cascade — the blogger's forsythia sells…
• Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee) — A threshold model of collective behaviour in Granovetter's sense, and the film is almost diagrammatic about it. The crowd holds for a measurable…

Arms races

• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick) [M] — The commitment device, and the precise reason a commitment device has to be both automatic and announced. The doomsday machine is Schelling's…

Coordination, and one famous case that does not work

• Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa) — Defence is a threshold public good and the film works through its provision problem in order. The village debate is whether to act at all; the…
• A Beautiful Mind (2001, Ron Howard) — Nothing correctly, and that is the reason to use it. The strategy profile the scene proposes is not a Nash equilibrium — each man has an incentive to…

Notes on coverage