Explaining collective action with rational models

We note the failure of a rational egoist model of human behavior to generate successful predictions of important economic and political behaviors including collective action. Alternative models are presented that combine rational, utility-maximizing features with concerns about collective welfare. The performance of these models in explaining contributing behavior in an experimentally-induced public goods game is compared to the performance of a rational egoist and collective welfare model. The results indicate that a model in which subjects are presumed to “trade off” benefits to self with benefits to others provides a better explanation of actual contributing behavior than either the rational egoist or collective welfare models, but still explains only a small amount of the individual variance in contributing behavior. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1989