Media coverage outlets and scholars highlight how The Cooperative Economy by Dovev Lavie offers a bold, prosocial alternative to today’s profit‑driven capitalism, especially amid Big Tech dominance and rising inequality. In Administrative Science Quarterly, Professor Gerry George describes the book as a thought‑provoking model for an ethical, community‑driven exchange system grounded in collective action and inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s work on governing the commons. He emphasizes that Lavie’s framework shows how prosocial behavior and cooperation can underpin a fairer market economy and opens rich new avenues for organizational research on collaboration and platform design.
Interviews and podcasts with Bocconi University, IMD, and other platforms explore Lavie’s proposed digital platform where diverse economic actors coordinate around shared values like well‑being, equality, social responsibility, and sustainability under resource constraints. These conversations explain how price subsidization, purchasing‑power‑adjusted pricing, and incentives for prosocial behavior can redirect technology toward human welfare while curbing opportunism, overconsumption, and abuse of natural resources.
Professor Anita McGahan’s discussion with Lavie delves into practical questions: the role of companies in such a system, whether government intervention is necessary, and how community‑driven private initiatives can trigger societal change. Bocconi Knowledge further underscores the book’s contribution by presenting it as an extraordinary plan to confront inequality, wealth concentration, data‑privacy loss, and environmental harm through concrete design principles for a cooperative economy.
Regulations can’t keep up with rapidly changing digital platforms that harm end users with misinformation, offensive content, breach of privacy, and business users with restrictive policies. Because it takes so long to pass regulations, and laws can differ from country to country, digital platforms continue to cause these and other problems. But a solution could be a voluntary certification system, according to an Academy of Management Perspectives article.
In a book review published at the Administrative Science Quarterly, Professor Gerry George discusses Dovev Lavie's book The Cooperative Economy, noting: "The Cooperative Economy lays out a thought-provoking alternative to the capitalistic economic model. The book advocates a new economic model predicated on an ethical, community-driven exchange system that relies on collective action to promote societal values. Readers who are interested in Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s work on governing the commons and the design principles behind the organization of collective action will find similar themes and inspiration for how prosocial behavior and cooperation can underpin a fairer, market-based economy. The Cooperative Economy provides new areas for research for organization theorists, who can dig deeper into the organizational design innovations that are pre-conditions to fostering collaboration among market actors. Lavie raises a big “what if”—what would be different if we move from self-interest to collective interest as the guiding assumption of human behavior? The insights on how we could experiment with our platform businesses to yield social and economic outcomes are a core contribution. Lavie brings complex ideas together well and provides a radical solution. The book brims with idealism and projects prosocial behavior as the panacea for capitalistic failures. Can we design and build a better economic system? Lavie makes us reflect: Why not?"
The full review is available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/00018392241283816
Dovev Lavie illustrates his digital platform where different economic actors can meet in pursuit of the common good. The interview elucidates who we can revolutionize the cooperative economy through a digital platform that leverages collective action, to promote social values such as well-being, equality, social responsibility and sustainability under resource constraints, and thus arrive at a community-driven ethical economic system based on prosocial behavior that guides the fair distribution of value.
Professor Anita McGahan from the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University interviewed me about the Cooperative Economy. Her questions were challenging but helped me tease out the core idea and rationale for the proposed economic system. How to create a new economic system based on prosocial behavior? What is the role for companies in that system? Would this require government intervention? Can community-driven private initiatives bring societal change? How can we leverage the same technologies that have caused harm to society to enhance human welfare? What are the new design principles? Answers can be found in the interview, which also reports the most recent findings from a field experiment at Bocconi University.
Can we solve societal grand challenges by designing a prosocial economic system?
Professor Dovev Lavie identifies several problems that our economic system has created and suggests a prosocial economic system, "The cooperative economy", as a possible solution. In his book "The Cooperative Economy" (Routledge, 2023)" he elaborates on the problems with our current economic system, considering the limitations of existing solutions, and discussing the specific design of the cooperative economy.
This podcast proposes an alternative economic system, “The Cooperative Economy,” as described in Dovev Lavie's recent book. This system incorporates new design principles that promote prosocial behavior while restricting opportunistic behavior. By introducing principles such as price subsidization and leveraging cutting-edge technologies, this system can prioritize societal values, foster a sense of community, and minimize environmental damage, thus offering a viable solution to current societal challenges.
A new book by Dovev Lavie, Professor at the Department of Management and Technology of Bocconi University, sets out an extraordinary plan to tackle urgent social problems of inequality, wealth concentration, loss of data privacy, and overconsumption. He discusses with Affiliate Professor of Leadership Katharina Lange how it would work.
Professor Dovev Lavie is an economics professor that began experimenting with new forms of economic exchange during the pandemic. A concept he developed and unfolded in his book. More info can be found on www.cooperativeeconomy.net. This conversations take us through some of the symptoms of the current economy and we discuss underlying causes as well as possible solutions like looking at purchasing power adjusted pricing, promoting and incentivizing prosocial behavior and other similar concepts that Dovev has developed in his book. Enjoy! Host: Amit Paul
Students of strategic management have been taught for generations how to gain competitive advantage to optimize profits. The same techniques have been used by Big Tech firms to acquire dominant market positions at the expense of society’s wellbeing. Today, fixing a system that rewards opportunistic behavior, instead of prioritizing societal values, seems an impossible task. In this podcast Dovev Lavie, Professor at the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University, identifies several problems that our current economic system has created, including wealth concentration, economic inequality, overconsumption, and the abuse of natural resources. He then proposes design principles on which a new economic system should be built to overcome these challenges and promote sustainability and cooperation within communities.
The flaws of the modern economic system in the Western world have become pervasive with the dominance of the Big Tech firms, while antitrust regulation and enforcement struggle to restrain these firms. We cannot blame the Big Tech firms for mastering the rules of an economic system that allows profit maximization to override societal values such as sustainability and well-being. What is the root cause of these challenges, and how can we cope with them?
In his recent book, The Cooperative Economy: A Solution to Societal Grand Challenges (Routledge), Dovev Lavie (Bocconi University) offers a bold solution to societal grand challenges that have taken a toll on humanity. Bocconi Knowledge, courtesy of the author and the publisher, publishes an excerpt from the book.