Does social media or offline social cohesion overcome collective action problems more effectively when both types of networks are prevalent? We investigate non-violent protests against a place-based economic reform in Austria—a country where one in two citizens uses Facebook but also one in...

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

Does social capital always promote solidarity and democracy, or are social networks such as sports clubs also vulnerable to populism? We exploit quasi-experimental variation in sports club membership in German cities. Sports clubs are booming in cities with successful soccer teams which pass the...

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

We consider competitive markets for multiple commodities with endogenous formation of one- or two-person households. Within each two-person household, externalities from the partner's commodity consumption and unpriced actions are allowed. Each individual has two types of traits: observable...

We develop a theoretical framework for equity in council voting games (CVGs). In a CVG, a fully representative voting body delegates decision-making to a subset of the members, as describes, e.g., the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Three equity concepts are proposed: ex-ante...

This paper reviews the relatively small literature on sabotage in contests. It looks at both the formal game-theoretic literature and the empirical and experimental literatures. The treatment is intended to be intuitive with minimal use of technical jargon.

We study how rich shareholders can use their economic power to deregulate firms that they own, thus skewing the income distribution towards themselves. Agents differ in productivity and choose how much labor to supply. High productivity agents also own shares in the productive sector and thus...

Ranking methods are fundamental tools in many areas. Popular methods aggregate the statements of experts' in different ways. As such, there are various reasonable ranking methods, each one of them more or less adapted to the environment under consideration. This paper introduces a new method,...

This paper derives a simple characterization of how to optimally divide an organization’s experts into different decision-making committees. The focus is on many three-member committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. We find that the allocation of experts to committees is...