We examine settings - such as litigation, labor relations, or arming and war - in which players first make non-contractible up-front investments to improve their bargaining position and gain advantage for possible future conflict. Bargaining is efficient ex post, but we show that a player may...

We examine the role of cooperative preferences, beliefs, and punishments to uncover potential cross-societal differences in voluntary cooperation. Using one-shot public goods experiments in four comparable subject pools from the US and the UK (two similar Western societies) and Morocco and...

Repeated interactions provide a prominent but paradoxical hypothesis for human cooperation in one-shot interactions. Intergroup competitions provide a different hypothesis that is intuitively appealing but heterodox. We show that neither mechanism reliably supports the evolution of cooperation...

In this paper we examine a model of terrorism which focuses on the tradeoffs facing a terrorist organization that has the ability to utilize either or both suicide and conventional terrorism tactics. The terrorist organization’s objective is to successfully attack at least one target. Success...

This paper builds a dynamic theory of secessions, conflictual or peaceful, analyzing the forward looking interaction between groups in a country. The proposed framework allows us to jointly address several key stylized facts on secession, and generates several novel predictions. We find that if...

Concern about potential free riding in the provision of public goods has a long history. More recently, experimental economists have turned their attention to the conditions under which free riding would be expected to occur. A model of free riding is provided here which demonstrates that...

Social preference research has fundamentally changed the way economists think about many important economic and social phenomena. However, the empirical foundation of social preferences is largely based on laboratory experiments with self-selected students as participants. This is potentially...

Experimental and behavioral economics are well established branches in the economic science. This essay presents and discusses some results and behavioral regularities from these fields which are of potential importance for public policy. After a brief introduction of what experimental and...

Real-effort experiments are frequently used when examining a response to incentives. For any particular real-effort task to be well-suited for such an exercise, subjects' cost for exerting effort must, for the range of incentives considered, result in an interior effort choice. The popular...

In this chapter, we discuss the "lab-in-the-field" methodology, which combines elements of both lab and field experiments in using standardized, validated paradigms from the lab in targeting relevant populations in naturalistic settings. We begin by examining how the methodology has been used to...