scholarly journals Collective action for watershed management: field experiments in Colombia and Kenya

2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUAN CAMILO CARDENAS ◽  
LUZ ANGELA RODRIGUEZ ◽  
NANCY JOHNSON

ABSTRACTThe collective action problem around water use and management involves solving both the problems of provision and appropriation. Cooperation in the provision can be affected by the rival nature of appropriation and the asymmetries in access. We report the results of two field experiments conducted in Colombia and Kenya. The irrigation game was used to explore the provision and appropriation decisions under asymmetric or sequential appropriation, complemented by a voluntary contribution mechanism experiment which looks at provision decisions under symmetric appropriation. The overall results were consistent with the patterns of previous studies: the zero contribution hypotheses is rejected whereas the most effective institution to increase cooperation was face-to-face communication, although we find that communication works much more effectively in Colombia than in Kenya. We also find that the asymmetric appropriation did reduce cooperation, though the magnitude of the social loss and the effectiveness of alternative institutional options varied across sites.

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kostadin Kushlev ◽  
Ryan Dwyer ◽  
Elizabeth W. Dunn

Smartphones provide people with a variety of benefits, but they may also impose subtle social costs. We propose that being constantly connected undercuts the emotional benefits of face-to-face social interactions in two ways. First, smartphone use may diminish the emotional benefits of ongoing social interactions by preventing us from giving our full attention to friends and family in our immediate social environment. Second, smartphones may lead people to miss out on the emotional benefits of casual social interactions by supplanting such interactions altogether. Across field experiments and experience-sampling studies, we find that smartphones consistently interfere with the emotional benefits people could otherwise reap from their broader social environment. We also find that the costs of smartphone use are fairly subtle, contrary to proclamations in the popular press that smartphones are ruining our social lives. By highlighting how smartphones affect the benefits we derive from our broader social environment, this work provides a foundation for building theory and research on the consequences of mobile technology for human well-being.


2020 ◽  
pp. 37-57
Author(s):  
Ray Brescia

This chapter examines the role of trust in solving collective action problems and the ways in which translocal networks harness this trust to advance broad social change. Such trust is present in the social relationships one forms with others, what is often referred to as one's social capital. From the Sons of Liberty to the civil rights movement, different social movements have utilized different means of communications to form, identify individuals who shared common beliefs, bind people together, and animate collective action. They often did this in networks, and networks of a particular kind. As the name implies, the translocal network is one that may span a wide geographic area and can harness the power of a large group of committed individuals but is also made up of smaller cells where face-to-face communication between individual members can occur. The chapter then looks at examples of the social movements that have emerged in social innovation moments to show how they have generally tended to organize themselves into translocal networks, at least until a means of communication emerged that allowed organizers to form different types of organizations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hardman

In the Winter 2017 edition of JLME, Dr. Carson outlined an economic approach to the epidemiology of HIV transmission within the gay community, with a special emphasis on mobile apps. His conclusion is that HIV transmission amongst the gay community constitutes a collective action problem, which is resolved by the social norm of using a condom. This article critiques Dr. Carson's approach from an economic perspective. By utilizing classic law and economic theory, this article will argue that HIV transmission may not, in fact, constitute a collective action problem in economic terms, and that instead condom use as a method of disease protection in theory can arise from purely rational, market driven actions. To do so, it borrows from transactional theory of information asymmetry to show the potential to alert counterparts as to serostatus. This conclusion provides an important supplement to Carson: rather than social norms being the core driver in condom usage to prevent HIV, instead condom use may arise solely as a result of rational, private decision making arising from market signaling. The article then critiques its own findings to demonstrate that it is unclear whether Carson's argument or the argument in this paper is, indeed, correct — which may represent a limitation in the analytical techniques advanced.


1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Marks

A national sample of noninstitutionalized adult Americans is used to test two hypotheses and their relation to fear of death, The first hypothesis, referred to as the high risk hypothesis (i.e., groups with higher mortality rates will express more fear of death than groups with lower rates of mortality), is rejected. The second hypothesis, referred to as the social loss hypothesis, is developed and tested across six status categories—race, sex, age, religion, level of education, and health status. Zero order differences did appear for sex and race, however, these differences were eliminated with the introduction of controls. Both hypotheses are rejected.


Author(s):  
Justin Buchler

This chapter presents a unified model of legislative elections, parties, and roll call voting, built around a party leadership election. First, a legislative caucus selects a party leader who campaigns based on a platform of a disciplinary system. Once elected, that leader runs the legislative session, in which roll call votes occur. Then elections occur, and incumbents face re-election with the positions they incrementally adopted. When the caucus is ideologically homogeneous, electorally diverse, and policy motivated, members will elect a leader who solves the collective action problem of sincere voting with “preference-preserving influence.” That leader will threaten to punish legislators who bow to electoral pressure to vote as centrists. Consequently, legislators vote sincerely as extremists and get slightly lower vote shares, but they offset that lost utility with policy gains that they couldn’t have gotten without party influence. Party leaders will rarely pressure legislators to vote insincerely.


Author(s):  
Mariek Vanden Abeele

Recent empirical work suggests that phubbing, a term used to describe the practice of snubbing someone with a phone during a face-to-face social interaction, harms the quality of social relationships. Based on a comprehensive literature review, this chapter presents a framework that integrates three concurrent mechanisms that explain the relational impact of phubbing: expectancy violations, ostracism, and attentional conflict. Based on this framework, theoretically grounded propositions are formulated that may serve as guidelines for future research on these mechanisms, the conditions under which they operate, and a number of potential issues that need to be considered to further validate and extend the framework.


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