Victorious alliances often fight about the spoils of war. This paper presents an experiment on the determinants of whether alliances break up and fight internally after having defeated a joint enemy. First, if peaceful sharing yields an asymmetric rent distribution, this increases the likelihood...

This paper considers evolutionarily stable decisions about whether to initiate violent conflict rather than accepting a peaceful sharing outcome. Focusing on small sets of players such as countries in a geographically confined area, we use Schaffer’s (1988) concept of evolutionary...

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...

We study endogenous group formation in tournaments employing experimental three-player contests. We find that players in endogenously formed alliances cope better with the moral hazard problem in groups than players who are forced into an alliance. Also, players who are committed to expending...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004This paper models the trade-off between production and appropriation in the presence of simultaneous inter- and intra-group conflicts. The model exhibits a ‘group cohesion effect ’: if the contest between the...

In many situations there is a potential for conflict both within and between groups. Examples include wars and civil wars and distributional conflict in multitiered organizations like federal states or big companies. This paper models such situations with a logistic technology of conflict. If...

In this paper, .rms engage in rent seeking in order to be assigned a governmental contract. We analyze how a change in the contract length a¤ects the .rms. rent-seeking behavior. A longer contract leads to more rent seeking at a contract assignment stage, as the .rms value the contract higher....

We characterize the unique Markov perfect equilibrium of a tug-of-war without exogenous noise, in which players have the opportunity to engage in a sequence of battles in an attempt to win the war. Each battle is an all-pay auction in which the player expending the greater resources wins. In...

We study equilibrium in a multistage race in which players compete in a sequence of simultaneous move component contests. Players may win a prize for winning each component contest, as well as a prize for winning the overall race. Each component contest is an all-pay auction with complete...