Sending out an S.O.S.: public safety communications interoperability as a collective action problem

Federal Communications Law Journal, June, 2007 by Jerry Brito

In his seminal work, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, economist Mancur Olson demonstrated that large groups will not act collectively absent outside compulsion or an independent inducement to individual group members. (39) The problem of public safety interoperability is a classic example of the collective action problem that Olson described. (40) This Part will apply Olson's theory of groups to public safety communications to show that although interoperability might be in the common interest of all public safety entities, individual entities have little incentive to assume the costs of achieving it.

We often assume that if a group of individuals has a common interest, they will work together to achieve their common goal. One of Olson's greatest insights was that the size of a group determines whether its individual members will act collectively. Small groups have a better chance of acting collectively for two reasons. First, an individual member of a small group may be better off if the collective good is provided even if she has to bear its entire cost. (41) That member will therefore undertake to provide the good herself even if she cannot exclude others from its benefits. Olson called such groups "privileged." (42) Second, in a sufficiently small group, if one member stops contributing for the collective good, the cost to the other members will rise noticeably such that they might refuse to continue making contributions themselves, and the collective good would no longer be provided. (43) Realizing that this would be the outcome, a member of a small group that values the collective good more than his contribution will likely continue to contribute. Olson called these groups "intermediate" groups. (44)

Members of a large group, however, may share a common interest in the collective good but nevertheless fail to coordinate. Olson called these large groups "latent" groups because they have the potential to be spurred to collective action either through compulsion or individual incentive. He explained:

   [The "latent" group] is distinguished by the fact that, if one
   member does or does not help provide the collective good, no other
   one member will be significantly affected and therefore none has
   any reason to react. Thus an individual in a "latent" group, by
   definition, cannot make a noticeable contribution to any group
   effort, and since no one in the group will react if he makes no
   contribution, he has no incentive to contribute. Accordingly, large
   or "latent" groups have no incentive to act to obtain a collective
   good because, however valuable the collective good might be to the
   group as a whole, it does not offer the individual any incentive to
   pay dues to any organization working in the latent group's interest,
   or to bear in any other way any of the costs of the necessary
   collective action. (45)

The group for our purposes is the universe of all potentially interoperable public safety entities. The collective good is interoperability. This means that every member of the group--i.e., every public safety agency--would presumably benefit from interoperability, and it is thus a goal they all share. However, the group is very large and thus latent. There are about 50,000 potentially interoperable public safety agencies in the United States (46) comprising an estimated 2.2 million personnel. (47) Applying Olson's theory, we see that no single public safety agency can make a noticeable contribution to a group effort to achieve interoperability, and since no one in the group will react if another agency makes no contribution, public safety agencies have no incentive to contribute. Olson also pointed out that the larger a group is, the higher the cost of organizing the group will be, and therefore "the smaller the fraction of the total group benefit any person acting in the group interest receives, and the less adequate the reward for any group-oriented action[.]" (48)