Elinor Ostrom

Gert Tinggaard Svendsen

Chapter 40 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice, 2025, pp 279-283 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Political scientist Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. This rewarded her pioneering studies within self-regulation to understand and solve the collective action problem as identified by Mancur Olson. Collective action problems occur whenever individual actors pursue their self-interest, but this leads to societal outcomes that are to the disadvantage of all. Ostrom calls the collective action problem the main challenge in political science. Overall, Ostrom's work is about solving the Olsonian free-rider problem in her expanded second-generation rational choice theory, showing how local people can govern their own commons.

Keywords: Collective action problems; Governing the commons; Self-regulation; Free-riding; First-generation rational choice theory; Second-generation rational choice theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781802207743
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