While John Stuart Mill’s notion on tyranny of majority was widely accepted, Mancur Olson, Jr. challenged such preexisting notion in his writing “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups” in 1965.
While Olson expresses doubt on tyranny of majority, he instead poses problems that collective action will face. One of such problem is the issue of free riders where individuals who are engaged in a collective action as a group will have an incentive to free ride on others’ efforts, under the premise that the collective action aims to provide public goods. The reason why such tendency to free ride occurs is because of the nature of public goods where in its pure form, are non-excludable as in including everyone in the group
While Olson expresses doubt on tyranny of majority, he instead poses problems that collective action will face. One of such problem is the issue of free riders where individuals who are engaged in a collective action as a group will have an incentive to free ride on others’ efforts, under the premise that the collective action aims to provide public goods. The reason why such tendency to free ride occurs is because of the nature of public goods where in its pure form, are non-excludable as in including everyone in the group