ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Collective action problem in heterogeneous groups.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed.
- Coordination costs may counteract the positive effects of a larger group size in determining the winner of between-group conflicts.iScience · 2026Article
- Blame the Player, Not the Game? How Perceived Institutional Inequality Predicts Displaced Aggression.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Should governments moralize health?Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Cultural tightness and resilience against environmental shocks in nonindustrial societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The temporal dynamics of group interactions in higher-order social networks.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Co-evolution of behaviour and beliefs in social dilemmas: estimating material, social, cognitive and cultural determinants.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Determinants of hyena participation in risky collective action.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Guppies in large groups cooperate more frequently in an experimental test of the group size paradox.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cooperation and coordination in heterogeneous populations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- On the interplay of hierarchies, conflicts, and cooperation: An experimental approach.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Modelling coupled human-environment complexity for the future of the biosphere: strengths, gaps and promising directions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Modelling behaviour in intergroup conflicts: a review of microeconomic approaches.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Correlates of individual participation in boundary patrols by male chimpanzees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Key individuals catalyse intergroup violence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Leaders of war: modelling the evolution of conflict among heterogeneous groups.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Inequality between identity groups and social unrest.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Assessing different historical pathways in the cultural evolution of economic development.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2022Article
- The dynamics of cooperation, power, and inequality in a group-structured society.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The cultural evolution and ecology of institutions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
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Abstract
I review the theoretical and experimental literature on the collective action problem in groups whose members differ in various characteristics affecting individual costs, benefits and preferences in collective actions. I focus on evolutionary models that predict how individual efforts and fitnesses, group efforts and the amount of produced collective goods depend on the group's size and heterogeneity, as well as on the benefit and cost functions and parameters. I consider collective actions that aim to overcome the challenges from nature or win competition with neighbouring groups of co-specifics. I show that the largest contributors towards production of collective goods will typically be group members with the highest stake in it or for whom the effort is least costly, or those who have the largest capability or initial endowment. Under some conditions, such group members end up with smaller net pay-offs than the rest of the group. That is, they effectively behave as altruists. With weak nonlinearity in benefit and cost functions, the group effort typically decreases with group size and increases with within-group heterogeneity. With strong nonlinearity in benefit and cost functions, these patterns are reversed. I discuss the implications of theoretical results for animal behaviour, human origins and psychology.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.