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Free Ride, Free Revelation, or Golden Rule?

IN recent years a number of writers have contributed to some fundamental advances in understanding collective economic action.' As Professor James Buchanan has so aptly put it, however, when relevant theories remain "in a preparadigm stage of development . . . no single treatment or presentation is likely to command universal assent among informed scholars nor is it likely to be free of its own ambiguities, confusions, and contradictions."2 Yet certain propositions do command wide-spread respect and one of the most famous is the virtually universally accepted free-rider hypothesis. According to it individual consumers will fail to state publicly their full monetary evaluation of a collective good. For our purposes, it will be helpful to distinguish between strong and weak statements of this proposition. The main purpose of this article is to argue that the dominant position occupied by the free-rider hypothesis in contemporary literature has little empirical scientific basis, and that, in fact, recently available experimental evidence seems much more nearly consistent with some plausible alternatives.