| Sumario: | The Chinese collectivization movement culminated in a famine from 1959–1961 that resulted in up to 30 million deaths. Lin argues that the famine was due to making collective membership mandatory. This turned a repeated Prisoners' Dilemma into a one-shot game with shirk as the dominant action. This paper shows that shirking need not be the dominant strategy. In a model with increasing returns or sufficiently small collectives, the prisoners' dilemma is replaced with a coordination game. In this case voluntary collectives may either collapse or flourish, consistent with the historical evidence. This result follows from a theoretical model of effort incentives on collectives when output is equally shared. The model isolates the essential role played by returns to scale and by collective size. While shirking can emerge, it is far from guaranteed. Imposing mandatory participation can lead to a collapse of effort in a previously thriving voluntary collective.
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