Samuelson (1954), Hardin (1968), and Olson (1965) each independently identified cases where a common interest among individuals failed to produce incentives for collectively beneficial action.
(as a reference to environmental and social theory)
Garrett Hardin was an ecologist who wrote about 'the tragedy of the commons'—a situation where people overuse shared resources (like a public pasture) because each person benefits from using it but doesn't bear the full cost of the damage.
Incentives(as used to explain why people act or don't act)
Rewards, punishments, or reasons that motivate a person to do something.
Olson (1965)(as a reference to group dynamics and economics)
Mancur Olson was an economist who studied group behavior and proved that even when a group of people share a goal, individuals often won't work toward it unless they're forced to or specially rewarded.
Samuelson (1954)(as a reference to economic theory)
Paul Samuelson was a Nobel Prize-winning economist who studied how people make decisions about shared resources; in 1954 he identified a problem where everyone benefits from something, but individuals don't have a reason to contribute to it.
Thus the concern over methodological individualism began to fade away, and might have disappeared completely had it not been for the sudden explosion of interest in game theory (or “rational choice theory”) among social scientists in the 1980s. The reason for this can be summed up in two words (and an article): the prisoner’s dilemma. Social scientists had always been aware that individuals in groups are capable of getting stuck in patterns of collectively self-defeating behavior. Paul Samuelson