Collective action problem
Etymology
The modern analysis stems from the economist Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (1965), which showed that rational individuals often won’t contribute to a common good they can enjoy for free. It connects to older ideas like the "tragedy of the commons" and to game theory’s prisoner’s dilemma. The phrase is now standard across economics, political science, and any discussion of cooperation at scale.
noun phrase · /kuh-LEK-tiv AK-shun PROB-lum/
A situation in which everyone would be better off cooperating, but each individual’s rational self-interest leads them not to, so the shared goal fails.
What it names
Why obvious wins — a clean commons, a funded public good, a strike that would work if everyone joined — so often go unachieved.
Example
Getting the whole industry to adopt the safer standard is a classic collective action problem — each firm waits for the others so it doesn’t bear the cost first.
Related idea
The tragedy of the commons is a specific collective action problem about depleting a shared resource; the broader term covers any failure to cooperate for mutual benefit, including under-provision of public goods.