A robust feature of models of electoral competition between two opportunistic, purely office-motivated parties is that both parties become indistinguishable in equilibrium. I this short note, I show that this strong connection between the office motivation of parties and their equilibrium choice...

A robust feature of models of electoral competition between two opportunistic, purely office-motivated parties is that both parties become indistinguishable in equilibrium. I this short note, I show that this strong connection between the office motivation of parties and their equilibrium choice...

In recent debates, morality or social norms have been proposed as an instrument to reduce conflict behavior. As the argument goes, moral people will not engage in socially not-tolerated behavior or, less so than amoral people. Analyzing this question in the framework of contest theory, we find...

One possible solution to mitigate the negative influences of conflict which has been proposed in the literature is to subject the relevant parties to education. Education can take two forms: increasing an individual's human capital on the one hand, increasing her social capital on the other...

The Internet globalizes the world. National regulatory autonomy shrinks. Transferring data from one country to another is almost costless. Foreign content is just a click away. Why is it that states have been able to re-install co-existence in some policy areas, and not in others? In data...

The paper provides a new formulation of the Mirrlees-Seade theo- rem on the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, under weaker assumptions and in a more general model. The formulation of the the- orem is independent of whether the model involves finitely many types or a continuous type...

This article discusses the limitations of the orthodox economic theory of the firm as a nexus of contracts. Various experimental studies have shown that the aggregation of individuals in groups changes behavior and preferences systematically. This perspective has been formalized by models of...

This article reports the results of a simple bargaining experiment on the ultimatum-revenge game. The game enables to differentiate between fairness that is stimulated by intentional based motives, distributional motives, and fairness considerations that mix both motives. The laboratory...

This paper studies the design of optimal utilitarian mechanisms for an excludable public good. Excludability provides a basis for making people pay for admissions; the payments can be used for redistribution and/or funding. Whereas previous work assumed that admissions are governed by the...

Carpenter and Matthews (2009) examine the cooperation norms determining people's punishment behavior in a social-dilemma game. Their findings are striking: absolute norms outperform the relative norms commonly regarded as the determinants of punishment. Using multiple punishment stages and...