action to achieve it. Although some few might enjoy futile gestures, usually people do
not want to feel that they are wasting their time or that their cause is hopeless. As
Chong comments, “[t]here may be some visceral relief but little expressive value to
shouting in the wilderness.”
If important benefits are made contingent on a belief in the
likelihood of success, the game is transformed from a Prisoner’s Dilemma to a Stag Hunt
or Assurance game, in which cooperation is the best strategy only if some critical mass of
others also cooperate.
The move to expand the motivations of actors in collective action to include, first,
ideological or altruistic interests, and, second, expressive or identity interests makes it
possible to square rational choice with collective action, but it begs of the question of
how those interests arise. If participants in the American Civil Rights movement, for
example, were moved by their beliefs in justice or concern for fellow citizens, and
derived satisfaction from expressing those beliefs and aligning their identities with the
movement, we need to explain where those “interests” came from and why they had such
powers.
An alternative approach to explaining collective action still within the rational choice
paradigm has been to consider the implications of repeated interactions. This approach
avoids the resort to ad hoc invocation of ideological, altruistic, expressive or identity
interests.
Most of this literature has focused on iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma games. As is by now
quite well know, the logic of repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma games is quite different from
that of one-period games. Axelrod’s short book, The Evolution of Cooperation, was
enormously influential in focusing attention on the implications of the shadow of the
future in repeated play games. Subsequently, the idea of iteration has been the basis for
much of the literature on how groups overcome the collective action problem,
particularly in how trust, group norms, explicit or implicit contracts, and other institutions
might emerge and persist as a solution to collective action problems.
13
Ibid, p. 91.
9
Convention