To investigate players' incentives in coalition formation, we consider a legislative bargaining game with asymmetric information about time preferences. The force that does not exist in usual bargaining games with unanimity is that due to majority rule, if a player signals himself as the patient...

In this paper, the link between community enforcement and co-operation in environments where trust is required is investigated. For this purpose, an assymetric trust game in which peer-to-peer sanctioning mechanisms are available is considered. Firstly, the outcome of this game is characterised...

Using personnel data, we compare worker productivity under a relative incentive scheme -where pay is based on individual productivity relative to the average productivity of the group- to productivity under piece rates. We find that productivity is at least 50% higher under piece rates. Further...

In this paper a public bureau can extract surplus value from the services it provides not only by misrepresenting its production costs to its oversight committee but also by influencing the perceptions of the legislative body such as the parliament or the congress and the public at large by...

This paper presents a participation game experiment to study the impact of uncertainty and costly political participation on the incidence of reform. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) show that uncertainty about who will ultimately gain or lose as a result of a reform can prevent its adoption. We...

We offer a simple general equilibrium model to analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e. shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) will affect the intensity of social conflict over the distribution of resources. Examples of conflict activities range from crime to civil war. We show that...

Esteban and Ray (Econometrica 1994) describe a measure of polarization that is closely connected to potential conflict or tension in a society, emphasizing the difference between polarization and inequality. In principle a very highly polarized society may have a low level of inequality...