[Shoue]

Cooperatives aren't nonprofit entities – they can be, sure, but many of them are profit-driven.

The claim that cooperatives act irrationally (and the implication that they're less efficient) requires some factual data to back that claim up, otherwise it's just that – an anecdotal claim. Here's academic data to dismiss those claims:

> Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms’ industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales

Source: Fakhfakh, F., Pérotin, V., & Gago, Mó. (2012). Productivity, Capital, and Labor in Labor-Managed and Conventional Firms: An Investigation on French Data. ILR Review, 65(4), 847–879. doi:10.1177/001979391206500404

Similar results were also found to hold in an older study by Craig and Pencavel in 1995.

[bernawil]

> Cooperatives aren't nonprofit entities – they can be, sure, but many of them are profit-driven.

A tech consultancy cooperative works exactly like most non-profits: they don't post a profit and distribute everything as salaries. The "non-profit" part is for the entity, not the people running it.

[Joel_Mckay]

Many have taken issue with William Forster Lloyd's assertion: "tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action in case there are too many users related to the available resources."

Rule by consensus is messy, inefficient, and ultimately prone to failure in commercial settings without slave labor.

I am not suggesting you are wrong for interjecting off-topic straw-man arguments, but your naive input lends credibility to the observations on human nature.

Have a wonderful day =)

[beedeebeedee]

>I am not suggesting you are wrong for interjecting off-topic straw-man arguments, but your naive input lends credibility to the observations on human nature.

I find that comment odd, given that they cited papers that directly spoke about the functioning of coops. Conversely, your comment mentioning the tragedy of the commons seems very off topic. Could you explain more how it relates?

Best of luck =)