free riding

free riding, benefiting from a collective good without having incurred the costs of participating in its production.

The problem of free riding was articulated analytically in The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965) by the American political economist Mancur Olson. Relying on an instrumental conception of rationality, according to which rational individuals make choices that they believe will bring about the outcomes they most prefer, Olson argued that there is little rational incentive for individuals to contribute to the production of a public (or common) good, given the costs they would incur, because they will benefit from the public good whether or not they contribute. (One of the defining characteristics of a public good is that everyone benefits from it.) Olson’s thesis, which suggested that group mobilization to advance a common interest may be difficult, challenged the assumption of the pluralist school in political science, according to which individuals readily mobilize to defend the interests of the groups to which they belong.

A familiar example of free riding is a partly unionized workplace. Benefits that result from trade union activity (such as improved working conditions and pay raises) accrue to all employees, including those who do not belong to the union. Although the benefits would be smaller or nonexistent if most workers had behaved rationally by free riding (i.e., by not belonging to the union and thus not paying union dues), each worker has a rational incentive to free ride. According to Olson, unions sought to overcome this difficulty through the use of selective incentives, benefits that would be available only to members of the union. Unions and other organizations have also adopted other devices to prevent or limit free riding, such as the closed shop.

Others besides those organizations and groups face the problem of free riding. The state, for example, seeks to address the issue by taxing citizens to fund public goods and services. Anthony Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) implicitly highlights the problem of free riding in relation to democracy. It is rational for an individual voter not to vote, given the costs associated with voting and the infinitesimal chance of influencing the electoral outcome.

The concept of free riding has also been used to analyze problems of environmental politics. Garret Hardin wrote in the article “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) that the exploitation and degradation of the environment is set to continue. It is rational for corporations to free ride, given the costs of individual action, which affect profits and competitiveness in an international economy. For states, managing environmental concerns places an individual burden on them relative to regulation and expenditure from taxes. Therefore, there is little incentive for individual states or corporations to do anything other than free ride. Yet, collectively, this is the worst possible outcome for the environment. This highlights the fundamental concern at the heart of Olson’s identification of this issue—that individually rational behaviour (i.e., free riding) is likely to produce collectively irrational outcomes.