This paper aims to explain the rise and fall of communism by exploring the interplay between economic incentives and social preferences transmitted by ideology. We introduce inequality-averse and inefficiency-averse agents and analyze their conflict through the interaction between leaders with...

We build a simple model of legal dualism in which a pro-poor legal reform, under certain conditions, causes the conflicting custom to go some way toward producing the change intended by the legislator. It then acts as an "outside anchor" that exerts a "magnet effect" on the custom. We illustrate...

Are natural resources a source of conflict or stability? Empirical studies demonstrate that rents from natural resources, and in particular oil, are an important source of civil war. Allegedly, resource rents attract rent seekers, which destabilize society. However, there is a large literature...

Citizens political participation to protests is a crucial issue for any political system, whether democratic or autocratic. Political systems have different ways of dealing with citizens’ protests, determining cost and benefit of public dissent, responding to public requests and allowing...

This paper analyzes farsighted stable sets when agents have heterogeneous expectations over the dominance paths. We consider expectation functions satisfying two properties of path-persistence and consistency. We show that farsighted stable sets with heterogeneous expectations always exist and...

We develop a continuous time dynamic game to provide with a benchmark theory of Arab Spring-type events. We consider a resource-dependent economy with two interacting groups, the elite vs. the citizens, and two political regimes, dictatorship vs. a freer regime. Transition to the freer regime...

This paper presents a game-theoretic model of network formation, which allows agents to enter bilateral alliances and to extract payoffs from enemies. Each pair of agents creates a surplus of one, which allies divide in equal parts. If agents are enemies, then the agent with more allies obtains...

This paper examines international cooperation on technological development as an alternative to international cooperation on GHG emission reductions. It is assumed that when countries cooperate they coordinate their investments so as to minimize the agreement costs of controlling emissions and...

The general attitude towards the sustainable management of environmental resources is evolving towards the implementation of participatory (as opposed to the classical command and control) and, especially at local scale, bottom up (as opposed to the classical top down) approaches. This progress...

We study the role of an enforcer in the effectiveness of selective incentives in solving the collective action problem when groups take part in a contest. Cost functions exhibit constant elasticity of marginal effort costs. If prize valuations are homogeneous, our source of heterogeneity induces...