The Feedback Paradox of Large Groups: A Philosophical Reconstruction of Olson, Responsibility Evaporation, and Dynamic Preference Spaces

This work develops a unified theoretical framework for understanding why large-scale institutions often fail to act, even when collective action is necessary. Building on Olson's paradox of collective action, the paper argues that the core mechanism behind institutional stagnation is the collapse of negative feedback. When visibility, attribution, and temporal accountability weaken, responsibility evaporates, preferences freeze, and organizations drift toward self-preservation. The paper introduces the concept of a Feedback Tracing Architecture, a structural design that restores negative feedback by making decision chains visible, reattaching responsibility to identifiable agents, and ensuring that long-term consequences return to decision-makers. The framework integrates insights from political theory, administrative studies, and dynamic preference modeling, including reinterpretations of Arrow's impossibility theorem and Simpson's paradox. An expanded appendix provides an international comparison of information disclosure systems, illustrating how variations in transparency, record preservation, and declassification rules affect the functioning of democratic feedback mechanisms. Although Japan is used as a primary case, the structural issues identified are not unique to Japan; they represent general failure modes of large-scale institutions when feedback loops are weakened.