This paper analyzes the ability of group members to cooperate in rent-seeking activities in a context of between-group competition. For this purpose, we develop an infinitely repeated rent-seeking game between two groups of different size. We first investigate Nash reversion strategies to...

By signing a fixed water sharing agreement (FWSA), countries voluntarily commit to release a fixed amount of river water in exchange for an agreed compensation. We examine the vulnerability of such commitments to reduced water ows. Among all FWSAs that are acceptable to riparian countries, we...

By signing an international river sharing agreement (RSA), countries voluntary commit to release water in exchange for a compensation. We examine the robustness of such commitments to reduced water flows. We focus on RSAs that satisfy core lower bounds and fairness upper bounds. We characterize...

We investigate the dynamics of political systems in a framework where transitions are driven by reforms and revolts, and where political systems are a priori unconstrained, ranging continuously from single-man dictatorships to full-scale democracies. The dynamics are governed by the likelihood...

This paper explains the multiple adoption of agriculture around ten thousand years ago, in spite of the fact that the …first farmers suffered worse health and nutrition than their hunter gatherer predecessors. If output is harder for farmers to defend, adoption may entail increased defense...

Nous exploitons dans cet article la théeorie des indices de pouvoir pour éevaluer les infuences respectives des deux classes d’électeurs dans le mode de scrutin instauré par la loi électorale du 29 juin 1820, dite loi du \double vote". Nous montrons, à l’aide d’un modèle simplifié,...

We show that a transfer targeting a minority of the population is sustained by majority voting, however small the minority targeted, when the probability to receive the transfer is decreasing and concave in income. We apply our framework to the French social housing program and obtain that...

We analyze and evaluate the di¤erent decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to now. Most of the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue in favor of the nucleolus as a...

We look at the consequences of allowing public health insurance (PuHI) to be voluntary when its coverage can be supplemented in the market. PuHI redistributes with respect to risk and income, and the market is affected by adverse selection. We argue that making PuHI voluntary does not lead to...

A model of entrepreneurial choices in an economy with a corrupt public procurement sector is built, providing predictions along two main dimensions. First, corruption is more frequent in sectors where public institutions are large buyers. Second, firms favoured with corrupt contracts enjoy extra...