Working Papers by Marco Battaglini
# | Title | Authors | Date | Length | Paper | Abstract | |
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1468 | Dynamic Collective Action and the Power of Large Numbers | Battaglini, Marco Palfrey, Thomas R. | 04/30/2024 | 56 pages | sswp1468.pdf | Collective action is a dynamic process where individuals in a group assess over time the benefits and costs of participating toward the success of a collective goal. Early participation improves the expectation of success and thus stimulates the subsequent participation of other individuals who might otherwise be unwilling to engage. On the other hand, a slow start can depress expectations and lead to failure for the group. Individuals have an incentive to procrastinate, not only in the hope of free riding, but also in order to observe the flow of participation by others, which allows them to better gauge whether their own participation will be useful or simply wasted. How do these phenomena affect the probability of success for a group? As the size of the group increases, will a "power of large numbers" prevail producing successful outcomes, or will a "curse of large numbers" lead to failure? In this paper, we address these questions by studying a dynamic collective action problem in which n individuals can achieve a collective goal if a share an of them takes a costly action (e.g., participate in a protest, join a picket line, or sign an environmental agreement). Individuals have privately known participation costs and decide over time if and when to participate. We characterize the equilibria of this game and show that under general conditions the eventual success of collective action is necessarily probabilistic. The process starts for sure, and hence there is always a positive probability of success; however, the process "gets stuck" with positive probability, in the sense that participation stops short of the goal. Equilibrium outcomes have a simple characterization in large populations: welfare converges to either full efficiency or zero as n → ∞ depending on a precise condition on the rate at which an converges to zero. Whether success is achievable or not, delays are always irrelevant: in the limit, success is achieved either instantly or never. | |
1466 | Organizing for Collective Action: Olson Revisited | Battaglini, Marco Palfrey, Thomas R. | 11/17/2023 | 57 | sswp_1466_revised-nov2023.pdf | We study a standard collective action problem in which successful achievement of a group interest requires costly participation by some fraction of its members. How should we model the internal organization of these groups when there is asymmetric information about the preferences of their members? How effective should we expect it to be as we increase the group's size n? We model the organization as an honest and obedient communication mechanism and obtain three main results: (1) For large n it can be implemented with a very simple mechanism that we call the Volunteer Based Organization. (2) The limit probability of success as n goes to infinity in the optimal honest and obedient mechanism is no better than an unorganized group, which is not generally true if obedience is replaced by the usual (weaker) requirement of interim individual rationality. (3) In spite of this asymptotic equivalence, an optimal organization provides substantial gains when the probability of success converges to zero, because it does so at a much slower rate than an unorganized group. Because of this, significant probabilities of success are achievable with simple honest and obedient organizations even in very large groups. | |
1415 | The Political Economy of Public Debt: A Laboratory Study | Battaglini, Marco Nunnari, Salvatore Palfrey, Thomas R. | 02/08/2016 | 50 | SSWP_1415.pdf | This paper reports the results from a laboratory experiment designed to study political distortions in the accumulation of public debt. A legislature bargains over the levels of a public good and of district specific transfers in two periods. The legislature can issue or | |
1371 | The dynamic free rider problem: A laboratory study | Battaglini, Marco Nunnari, Salvatore Palfrey, Thomas R. | 01/08/2013 | sswp1371.pdf | |||
1355 | The Free Rider Problem: A Dynamic analysis (Revised March 2012) | Battaglini, Marco Nunnari, Salvatore Palfrey, Thomas R. | 10/15/2011 | sswp1355R.pdf | |||
1352 | Legislative bargaining and the dynamics of public investment | Battaglini, Marco Nunnari, Salvatore Palfrey, Thomas R. | 08/31/2011 | sswp1352.pdf | |||
1318 | Political institutions and the dynamics of public investment | Battaglini, Marco Nunnari, Salvatore Palfrey, Thomas R. | 01/30/2010 | sswp1318.pdf | |||
1296 | Information aggregation & strategic abstention in large laboratory elections | Battaglini, Marco Morton, Rebecca Palfrey, Thomas R. | 07/01/2008 | 12 pages | sswp1296c.pdf | ||
1273 | The dynamics of distributive politics | Battaglini, Marco Palfrey, Thomas R. | 07/01/2007 | 44 pages | sswp1273.pdf | ||
1263 | The Swing Voter's Curse in the laboratory | Battaglini, Marco Morton, Rebecca Palfrey, Thomas R. | 12/01/2006 | 50 pages | sswp1263.pdf | ||
1262 | Efficiency, equity, and timing of voting mechanisms | Battaglini, Marco Morton, Rebecca Palfrey, Thomas R. | 12/01/2006 | 40 pages | sswp1262.pdf |