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About Annual Meeting
Theory and research on collective action has yielded an array of important insights into what leads people to sacrifice for their groups, despite the temptation to free ride on contributions from fellow members. But the literature has largely ignored processes that bring people to those groups in the first place. The literature has similarly ignored the fact that different groups providing similar public goods often compete (implicitly or explicitly) to attract new members. Here we extend the reach of collective action theories by looking into these interrelated issues. Doing so yields a number of important new micro- and macro-level insights about the dynamics of collective action groups. Results from the three laboratory experiments support our predictions about the conditions under which groups will compete to attract new members by sacrificing more for group goals. Moreover, prospective members respond these more productive groups as predicted, joining them at much higher rates and then contributing to them at normative (high) levels, rather than free-riding. These processes give way to Matthew effects, where initially productive groups are more successful at attracting new members, which spurs even more downstream membership gains to those initially productive groups. We thus show that competition for group members can yield drastic inequalities in the size and success of collective action groups.