It is not because no one is willing to contribute to the club that the club ends up empty; rather, the club being empty leads to no one being in the club.
network externalities (network externalities) refer to the property of certain goods where the benefit a consumer receives changes with the number of users. For “participating in a club”, it is clear that as the number of active members increases, each new member gains more, thus it exhibits positive network externalities (positive network externalities).
Let the effort each member must expend be p, and the satisfaction gained be U. The club can then be abstracted as a consumption good with positive network externalities.
Assume a club has 1 member, and the enthusiasm level for club activities is uniformly distributed on [0, 1] (lower values indicate higher enthusiasm). For each member x \in [0, 1], depending on whether they participate, the utility function can be written as:
The dilemma encountered is very similar to that in this post.
However, this matter is discussed in great detail in Olson’s seminal work The Logic of Collective Action, along with a solution. In short:
Any organization inevitably falls into this dilemma: members will not act for the benefit of the organization / the benefits the organization might bring to them. For example, the simplest case: a music club needs to perform, so it borrows a rehearsal room. But other members of
My idea is as follows: if we revise the original poster’s model according to Olson’s theory, there will actually be some changes.
When not participating in activities, Ux should be a positive number, because when Ux = 0, non‑members have no reason to join the group at all.
When participating in activities, n(1‑x) is actually the sum of each person’s enthusiasm, but the overall sense of achievement of the activity is not simply the sum of individual enthusiasm (for example, in a competition everyone may be enthusiastic but no one gets any ranking), but rather the service we ultimately experience/enjoy, i.e., the cake that everyone produces, which should be the sum of each person’s contribution.
(Perhaps after I review this book, I will have other better ideas.
This year I was fortunate to attend the XJTU Hundred Clubs event in person, and I’d like to share some random thoughts here.
When talking with fellow alumni, I learned that students join clubs rather pragmatically, which is understandable: if students can’t gain some benefits from a club (such as volunteer hours or extra points for graduate school recommendation), then the only reason to join would probably be pure passion.
The school doesn’t seem to value clubs, or at least doesn’t treat them as student groups: when two clubs squeeze together for recruitment, it’s inevitably a bit shabby, and some clubs have many members and many exhibits; relying only on sponsor‑provided materials, they can barely set up.
This conclusion makes sense:
Active members of a club don’t even have to be from this university (though the core members must be), for example some associations also gather enthusiasts from other schools.
Although not many students join the club recruitment groups, those who do are mostly interested in the clubs (especially volunteer service ones, there are so many people). The conversion rate is expected not to be low, and quite a few actually join (not sure if fellow alumni can confirm).
Since we’ve made a horizontal comparison, let me add some : overall, for clubs of the same type, the recruitment group size of is about 3:1 compared to , but ’s club communication focuses more on the club’s anchor (e.g., the Wutong Harmonica Club prefers to talk about harmonicas), whereas vividly illustrates this statement:
For example, in club xx you can talk about yy and zz, and even chat about xx
Another passage I find very reasonable:
In short: people need socialization.
That’s all I will write. I hope clubs across universities can cooperate more and progress together. It was truly lucky to connect with the Wutong Harmonica Club this year.
Also, scrolling here reminded me that I haven’t seen ’s MC club…
: overall, for clubs of the same type, the recruitment group size of 
, but 