Collective Action Problems

In this video, Professor Jonathan Anomaly (Duke and UNC – Chapel Hill) discusses collective action problems, which include any situation in which there is a conflict between individual rationality and social welfare, so that individuals working in isolation produce a worse outcome than they might if they could find a way to coordinate.

Jonathan Anomaly

Director of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Universidad de Las Américas

I work mostly on issues at the intersection of ethics, economics, and biology. These include what we should do about antibiotic resistance, and how we should respond to the emerging market for genetic engineering. More generally, I’m interested in the relative role of social norms and legal institutions in solving different kinds of collective action problems. I recently co-authored Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement (Routledge, 2020).

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