We consider rent-seeking contests between and within two equal-sized groups. Each group adopts one of three sequences: first internal then external contest, first external then internal contest, and simultaneous internal and external contests. Groups cannot unilaterally postpone a contest...

This paper presents a review of empirical methods used to assess the behavioral, economic, and political outcomes of Internet and social media usage. Instead of merely surveying the various impacts of the Internet, we examine the methods adopted to identify these impacts. We describe two main...

Previous studies have documented a positive association between election fraud and the intensity of civil conflict. It is not clear, however, whether this association is causal or due to unobserved institutional or cultural factors. This paper examines the relationship between election fraud and...

We introduce three variations of the Hirshleifer-Skaperdas conflict game to study experimentally the effects of post-conflict behavior and repeated interaction on the allocation of effort between production and appropriation. Without repeated interaction, destruction of resources by defeated...

We use economic theory to examine the intensity of fundamentalist sects. Leaders work to enhance their followers? observance level. We model three stylized situations under which fundamentalist groups function, examining the intensity of observance in each. We find that, under reasonable...

We examine who benefits when there is a strong leader in place, and those who benefit when a situation lacks a proper leader. There are fractious terrorist groups who seek to serve the same people in common cause against a common enemy. The groups compete for rents obtained from the public by...

The individual voting behavior on the abolishment of single income-tax exemptions crucially depends on how strongly agents are affected by other deduction possibilities that are not at stake in the reform plans of the government. The interactions depend (i) on the shape of the tax schedule, and...

In this paper I consider the desirability of drugs that enhance cognitive abilities in the context of tournaments that are used as optimal labor contracts as in Lazear and Rosen (1981). Such drugs reduce the number of voluntary participants in a tournament, but increase individual and total...

We model an infinitely repeated Tullock contest, over the sharing of some given resource, between two ethnic groups. The resource is allocated by a composite state institution according to relative ethnic control; hence the ethnic groups contest the extent of institutional ethnic bias. The...

A conclave is a voting mechanism in which a committee selects an alternative by voting until a sufficient supermajority is reached. We study experimentally welfare properties of simple three-voter conclaves with privately known preferences over two outcomes and waiting costs. The resulting game...