scholarly journals Disobedient Markets: Street Vendors, Enforcement, and State Intervention in Collective Action

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (11) ◽  
pp. 1524-1555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calla Hummel
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
La Paz ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
Global Workforce ◽  
Poor Group ◽  
Game Theoretic

At 50% of the global workforce, informal workers constitute a large, diffuse, and resource-poor group with high barriers to collective action. Contrary to scholars’ expectations, informal workers organize to varying degrees in most countries, and states often encourage them to do so. Why do some informal workers organize while others do not? I argue that states can intervene in informal workers’ collective action decisions: As enforcement costs increase, states may pay informal workers to organize, and then bargain with the resulting organization over self-regulation. I present a game theoretic model of state intervention in collective action and illustrate it with original ethnographic, survey, and interview evidence from street markets in La Paz, Bolivia. I suggest that informal workers interact strategically with states and conclude with implications for formalization policies.

State Intervention in Collective Action

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-53
Author(s):  
Calla Hummel
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Multiple Equilibria ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Negative Externalities ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
The World ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Model ◽  
Different Levels

Chapter 2 develops a theory of state intervention in collective action. It argues that as unorganized people create negative externalities, officials increasingly have an incentive to encourage people who organize self-regulating organizations. When officials intervene with cash, licenses, and access to the bureaucracy, they lower the barriers that kept people from organizing on their own. Once informal workers take these incentives and start organizations, officials can bargain over regulation and enforcement with representatives instead of a mass of individuals. The theory builds on contributions from Olson (1965), Ostrom (1990), and Holland (2017). The theory is formalized in a game theoretic model to show that officials and informal workers are strategically linked. The chapter uses the model to demonstrate the exact conditions under which we can expect informal workers’ organizations as a result of officials’ encouragement. The model produces multiple equilibria that reflect the different levels of organization that we observe in informal sectors around the world. The equilibrium conditions generate clear expectations for the patterns that we should see in the empirical chapters if the theory is correct.

Why Do Informal Workers Organize?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Calla Hummel
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Capacity Constraints ◽  
Grassroots Activism ◽  
Street Vendor ◽  
La Paz ◽  
Informal Work ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Informal Workers

Chapter 1 introduces the puzzle of organized street vendors with the stories of two street vendors: Rosa, the founding leader of a champagne ladies’ union in La Paz, and Renato, who works as an unorganized electronics vendor in São Paulo. The chapter then situates the puzzle within existing research on collective action, civil society, informal work, and state capacity. According to most scholars, informal workers do not organize, which makes Rosa’s union and its affiliation with a national street vendor confederation puzzling. The chapter outlines an explanation for why informal workers organize, assesses alternative explanations around grassroots activism and clientelism, and presents the research design for the book. Specifically, it finds that officials encourage informal workers to organize self-regulating groups. The chapter argues that this is most likely to happen where officials have governance goals and career ambitions but face capacity constraints and where informal workers have the know-how to organize self-regulating groups.

Managing Contentious Collective Action

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Calla Hummel
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Street Vendor ◽  
La Paz ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Street Vending ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Survey Results ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

Chapter 5 develops an ethnography of street vendors, their organizations, and the city officials who they interact with in the city of La Paz, Bolivia. The chapter is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the city over four research trips in 2012, 2014 to 2015, 2018, and 2019 as well as administrative data on 31,906 street vending licenses in the city. Fieldwork included interviews, participant observation at dozens of meetings between bureaucrats and organized vendors, ride-alongs with the Municipal Guard, a street vendor survey, working as a street vendor in a clothing market, and selling wedding services with a street vendor cooperative. The theory’s observable implications are illustrated with ethnographic evidence, survey results, and license data from La Paz. I discuss how street vending has changed in the city and how officials have intervened in collective action decisions as the informal sector grew. The chapter demonstrates that officials increased benefits to organized vendors as the costs of regulating markets increased. Additionally, the leaders that take advantage of these offers tend to have more resources than their colleagues, and as the offers increased, so did the level of organization among the city’s street vendors. The chapter also discusses the many trade-offs that officials make in implementing different policies, and how officials manage the often combative organizations that they encourage.

Collective Action and Constraints on Repression at the Endgame

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (8) ◽  
pp. 1042-1073 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiberiu Dragu ◽  
Yonatan Lupu
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Simple Game ◽  
Coordination Game ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Model

How can human rights abuses be prevented or reduced? Using a simple game-theoretic model, we demonstrate that repression can become a coordination game when the potential for abuses is greatest: when dissent against a regime has grown sufficiently powerful. In such scenarios, repression depends on how the leader’s agents coordinate on implementing a repression order. If and to the extent agents believe other agents will not comply with an order to repress, leaders can expect agents to disobey orders and will be less likely to order repression. This logic of expectations constitutes a third mechanism for constraining repression, in addition to sanctioning (i.e., the logic of consequences) and normative mechanisms (i.e., the logic of appropriateness). We formally explore how the logic of expectations can constrain the implementation of repression and also show that the logic of expectations has the greatest potential to constrain repression in middle regimes or “anocracies.” In turn, this has broader implications for the strategies human rights advocates use in such regimes, how leaders structure their security forces, and for the study of why legal rules might be especially effective in such regimes.

Group Size and Collective Action

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARUN AGRAWAL ◽  
SANJEEV GOYAL
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Group Size ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Collective Good ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Distinctive Aspect ◽  
Game Theoretic Model ◽  
Large Groups

This article examines the hypothesis that group size is inversely related to successful collective action. A distinctive aspect of the article is that it combines the analysis of primary data collected by the authors with a game-theoretic model. The model considers a group of people protecting a commonly owned resource from excessive exploitation. The authors view monitoring of individual actions as a collective good and focus on third-party monitoring. We argue that the costs of monitoring rise more than proportionately as group size increases. This factor along with lumpiness in the monitoring technology yields the following theoretical conclusion: Medium-sized groups are more likely than small or large groups to provide third-party monitoring. The authors find that the empirical evidence is consistent with this theoretical result.

Street Markets in La Paz and São Paulo

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-108
Author(s):  
Calla Hummel
Keyword(s):  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Informal Markets ◽  
La Paz ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Street Vending ◽  
Incentive Structures ◽  
Game Theoretic

Chapter 4 tells the history and structure of street vending in two municipalities in the La Paz department of Bolivia and two districts in the São Paulo state in of Brazil. This chapter demonstrates how officials actively intervene in informal markets and workers’ organizations, and suggests how those interventions vary over time, creating highly structured organizations around La Paz and fleeting organizations around São Paulo. The chapter then develops the specific incentive structures that officials and workers face. Chapter 4 grounds the game theoretic model’s assumptions in observations from street markets in La Paz: It shows that unorganized street vendors create negative externalities, that street vendors approach collective action decisions with a cost–benefit analysis, that officials offer private benefits to organized street vendors, especially leaders, and that once organized, street vendors self-regulate and bargain with officials.

Why Informal Workers Organize

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calla Hummel
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Informal Worker ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
Global Workforce ◽  
Civil Society Participation ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Ethnographic Data

Informal workers make up over two billion workers or about 50 percent of the global workforce. Surprisingly, scholars know little about informal workers’ political or civil society participation. An informal worker is anyone who holds a job and who does not pay taxes on taxable earnings, does not hold a license for their work when one is required, or is not part of a mandatory social security system. For decades, researchers argued that informal workers rarely organized or participated in civil society and politics. However, millions of informal workers around the world start and join unions. Why do informal workers organize? In countries like Bolivia, informal workers such as street vendors, fortune-tellers, witches, clowns, gravestone cleaners, sex workers, domestic workers, and shoe shiners come together in powerful unions. In South Africa, South Korea, and India, national informal worker organizations represent millions of citizens. The data in this book find that informal workers organize in nearly every country for which data exists, but to varying degrees. This raises a related question: Why do informal workers organize in some places more than others? The reality of informal work described in this book and supported by surveys in 60 countries, over 150 interviews with informal workers in Bolivia and Brazil, ethnographic data from multiple cities, and administrative data upends the conventional wisdom on the informal sector. The contrast between scholarly expectations and emerging data underpin the central argument of the book: Informal workers organize where state officials encourage them to.

scholarly journals Modelling collective action to change social norms around domestic violence: social dilemmas and the role of altruism

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Gram ◽  
Rolando Granados ◽  
Eva M. Krockow ◽  
Nayreen Daruwalla ◽  
David Osrin
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Social Dilemma ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Taking Action

AbstractInterventions promoting collective action have been used to prevent domestic violence in a range of settings, but their mechanisms of operation remain unclear. We formalise and combine feminist theoretical approaches to domestic violence into a game-theoretic model of women’s collective action to change gendered social norms and outcomes. We show that social norms create a social dilemma in which it is individually rational for women to abstain from action to prevent domestic violence among neighbours, but all women suffer negative consequences if none take action. Promoting altruism among women can overcome the social dilemma. Discouraging women from tolerating domestic violence, imposing additional external punishment on men for perpetrating violence, or lowering costs to women of taking action against violence may not work or even backfire. We invite researchers on community mobilisation to use our framework to frame their understandings of collective action to prevent domestic violence.

Stability in the informal value transfer systems: norms of trust or institutions of control?

2017 ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
A. Lyasko
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Institutional Economics ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Transfer System ◽  
Value Transfer ◽  
Partner Interaction ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Model ◽  
Informal Value Transfer System

Informal financial operations exist in the shadow of official regulation and cannot be protected by the formal legal instruments, therefore raising concerns about the enforcement of obligations taken by their participants. This paper analyzes two alternative types of auxiliary institutions, which can coordinate expectations of the members of informal value transfer systems, namely attitudes of trust and norms of social control. It offers some preliminary approaches to creating a game-theoretic model of partner interaction in the informal value transfer system. It also sheds light on the perspectives of further studies in this area of institutional economics.

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