Collective Action and Exchange

In Collective Action and Exchange: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Contemporary Political Economy, William D. Ferguson unifies a broad range of new developments in economic theory and closely related areas of study to present a comprehensive political economy text, aimed at advanced undergraduates in economics and graduate students in the social sciences. The text utilizes collective action as a unifying concept, arguing that collective action problems lie at the foundation of market success and failure and serve as a theoretical rationale for policy. In pursuing this goal, Ferguson draws on information economics, social preference theory, cognition theory, new institutional economics, and network theory. He uses both classical and evolutionary game theory as modeling frameworks, with extensions to agent-based, generative models. In turn, these models effectively bind the ideas presented, generating a coherent theoretic approach to political economy that stresses sometimes overlooked implications.