Participation in Voluntary Organizations and Group Size
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5917495 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jeroen Weesie (Utrecht University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 35-66 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Rationality and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1043-4631 • E-ISSN: 1461-7358 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1043463190002001003 |
| OpenAlex | W2102763013 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
Participation in collective action is hard to understand as rational behavior unless strong intrinsic benefits or selective social or economic incentives are assumed. This article describes the Status Competition Model for organizations in which members are motivated to participate for selective social rewards like the status attained from an annual "Medal of Honor." Status is awarded on the basis of relative voluntary contributions. Using this model, the set of active members and its relation with the size of membership is studied. The number of volunteers is characterized in terms of the individual costs and benefits of participation. It is deduced that active members are necessarily very homogeneous with respect to a one-dimensional parameter of their costs and benefits. Hence the number of active members will be small if members differ nontrivially in their costs and benefits. Under some additional assumptions, it is argued that in similar kinds of organizations, the number of active members is proportional to the square root of the number of members
Business · Collective action · Economics · Homogeneous · Incentive · Management · Microeconomics · Political science · Public economics · Turnover · Voluntary association · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Game Theory and Applications · Law · Mathematics
Toward a theory of the rent-seeking society
The Rise and Decline of Nations
The Logic of Collective Action
Group size, group homo-geneity, and the aggregate provision of a pure public good under cournot behavior
Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts
The cumulation of incompetence in organizations
A mathematical analysis of Boudon's IEO model
On Education, opportunity, and social inequality
| Citations per year | 0.03 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1993 - 1993 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |