Articles A DIAGRAMMATIC EXPOSITION OF THE LOGIC OF COLLECTION ACTION

During the decade since the appearance of Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action, a number of economists and political scientists have focused their efforts on, further developing the model of group behavior analyzed by Olson. 1 While these efforts have contributed to both the precision and the generality of the theory of collective action, the theory remains a somewhat loosely connected set of verbal and graphical assertions about group behavior, and the central results of the theory have not all been demonstrated using the same analytical style. This paper attempts to remedy this deficiency in some major respects. 2 In addition to analyzing the r lationship between group size and the voluntary provision of public goods, which is the focus of Olson's work, this paper carries out similar analyses of the relationship between the provision of publi