Instituting a Development

During this summer, and perhaps later on, a few colleagues and I working on another blog to help expand our thoughts on the topics of institutions and development.

My first post deals with the rationality of individuals when faced with group wants.

You see, groups don’t make decisions, individuals do. In some sense, there is no such thing as collective action, but merely as an aggregate of the multitude of individual actions made by it members. Even then, there are multitudes of actions that happen outside the the control of said group, and these can also be taken into account as affecting the structure and perseverance of the group because of the transfer of information amongst individuals. Back to our point: Group actions must be individually rational. This is important, if the actions are not individually rational, many actions that are considered undesirable (from the group’s point of view) are more likely to occur.

The link can be found here.

Author: Deric Tilson

I am a classically-trained economist and doctoral student at George Mason. I'm an ecopragmatist and interested in the cross-section where economics, ecology, and ethology meet. I hope to work for non-for-profits specializing in economic development and eventually moving to either the public sector or a think tank. My research interests include the political economy of war, resource economics, the applications of complexity theory, the mitigation of risk by impoverished individuals, and global water scarcity. View all posts by Deric Tilson