Cooperation and Institutional Arrangements

Abstract

"The formal study of cooperation is something of a cottage industry these days in political science, primarily because it is central to so many vital issues. These issues, of course, are not new. Rousseau's famous 'stag hunt dilemma,' Hume's "worry over commons problems and public goods supply (as in neighbors draining a meadow), and Hobbes's generalized concern over how human societies might avoid the dire consequences of life in the state of nature, all suggest that voluntary cooperation in social settings is a commodity in considerable demand and, presumably, In short supply. Some, like Hobbes, have made this disparity between the demand for and the supply of voluntary cooperation the basis of an elaborate rationale for authoritative coercion In the form of the State."