Economics, public goods and collective action (course)

The Course

This course is meant to be a relatively in-depth guide to learning about public goods and collective action. I you just want the gist, just go to the wikipedia article. I don't consider this course complete, so please edit it if you wish to add something.

The first two links in this course give an overview of what public goods are.

The Logic of Collective Action is an oldish book, and there are parts that are difficult to understand today, but it teaches the logic of collective action relatively well.

Governing the Commons is a book about the ways in which the problem of collective action can be overcome. It has a number of very good examples.

The 4 Lessons

1. 1
   

   Public good - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (3597 words)

   Gives a good overview of what a public good/collective action problem is and how it works.

    
2. 2
   

   Public Goods and Externalities, by Tyler Cowen: The Concise Encyclopedia of Econ (1318 words)

   Describes what public goods and externalities are, but emphasizes that sometimes these problems can solve themselves.

    
3. 3
   

   The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Second printing with new preface and appendix (Harvard Economic Studies) (186 pages)

   

   By Mancur Olson. <p> This book develops an original theory of group and organizational behavior that cuts across disciplinary lines and illustrates the theory with empirical and historical studies of particular organizations. Applying economic analysis to the subjects of the political scientist, sociologist, and ...

    
4. 4
   

   Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions) (298 pages)

   

   By Elinor Ostrom. The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource ...

    

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