Leading by Example Among Equals

Konuray Mutluer

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: I examine the factors that determine whether a grassroots social movement reaches the necessary size to achieve its goal. I study a collective action problem where identical individuals who value the common goal sequentially decide whether to join the movement. The model has two key ingredients: (i) The movement is facing a freeriding problem (i.e., while individuals want the movement to succeed, they would rather have others bear the cost of participation) and (ii) The necessary number of members to achieve success is ex-ante unknown but it can be revealed as the movement grows in size. The central insight is that an increase in cost of participation, such as harsher and more likely punishment for members of the movement, can lead to a drastic surge in membership.

Keywords: Social movements; repression; free-riding; threshold uncertainty; dynamic games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-mac and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp791.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp791

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Vasiljevova ().