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	Collective Action Analysis	Public Choice Analysis
Campo	Political Economy	Political Economy
Famiglia	MCDM	MCDM
Anno di origine	1965	1962
Ideatore	Mancur Olson & Elinor Ostrom	James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock
Tipo	Formal model of group behavior	Formal framework for collective decision-making
Fonte seminale	Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674537514	Buchanan, J. M., & Tullock, G. (1962). The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. University of Michigan Press. ISBN: 9780865972186
Alias	Logic of Collective Action, Olsonian Collective Action Theory, Free-Rider Analysis, Group Size and Public Goods Theory	Public Choice Theory, Economics of Politics, Constitutional Political Economy, Virginia School Public Choice
Correlati	4	4
Sintesi	Collective action analysis explains why rational, self-interested individuals will often fail to act together to secure a common interest, even when every member of the group would benefit from doing so. In his 1965 The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson overturned the prevailing assumption that groups with shared interests would naturally organize to advance them, showing instead that because the fruits of collective action are non-excludable public goods, each member has an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of others. The problem worsens as the group grows: large, latent groups chronically undersupply their collective good unless they offer selective incentives or coerce participation, while small, privileged groups can succeed. Elinor Ostrom's 1990 Governing the Commons later documented how communities craft durable institutions that solve such dilemmas without the state or privatization, earning her the Nobel Prize.	Public choice analysis is the application of the methods of economics — methodological individualism, rational self-interest, and equilibrium reasoning — to the study of political and collective decision-making. Pioneered by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their 1962 book The Calculus of Consent and surveyed comprehensively in Dennis Mueller's Public Choice III, it treats voters, politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups not as benevolent servants of the public interest but as utility-maximizing agents pursuing their own goals within political institutions. A central methodological move is the distinction between constitutional choice — the selection of the rules of the game behind a veil of uncertainty — and in-period choice within those rules. The framework's signature derivation is the optimal decision rule (the optimal majority), found by minimizing the sum of the external costs a rule imposes and the costs of reaching agreement under it.