In the 50 years since its publication, Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action has had an enormous impact on the academic literature in both economics and political science. In this review essay, I discuss Olson's work in light of the ensuing research, particularly developments in the...

Under the standard summation technology, pure public goods can be provided via the direct contributions mechanism, even in an arbitrarily large group. However, if the public good exhibits any degree of rivalry, individual consumption of the public good will fall to zero as group size grows...

Morgan (2000) has shown that lotteries are potentially an effective mechanism for the provision of public goods. In particular, he has shown that lotteries lead to a level of provision above the level provided by the voluntary contributions mechanism. In this paper, we analyze the effect of...