This paper explores the dynamics of nation-building policies and the conditions under which a state can promote a shared national identity on its territory. A forward-looking central government that internalizes identity dynamics shapes them by choosing the level of state centralization....

Costly delay in negotiations can induce the negotiating parties to be more forthcoming with their information and improve the quality of the collective decision. Imposing a deadline may result in stalling, in which players at some point stop making concessions but switch back to conceding at the...

Costly delay in negotiations can induce the negotiating parties to be more forthcoming with their information and improve the quality of the collective decision. Imposing a deadline may result in stalling, in which players at some point stop making concessions but switch back to conceding at the...

In the present work, agreement on allocation of payments from multiple issues requires unanimous consent of all parties involved. The agents are assumed to know the aggregate payoffs but do not know their decomposition by issues. This framework applies to many real-world problems, such as the...

I propose a simple model of signed network formation, where agents make friends to extract payoffs from weaker enemies. The model thereby accounts for the interplay between friendship and alliance on one hand and enmity and antagonism on the other. Nash equilibrium configurations are such that...

In the study of farsighted coalitional behavior, a central role is played by the von Neumann-Morgenstern (1944) stable set and its modification that incorporates farsightedness. Such a modification was first proposed by Harsanyi (1974) and was recently reformulated by Ray and Vohra (2015). The...

This paper introduces a model of coalition formation with claims. It assumes that agents have claims over the outputs they could produce by forming coalitions. Outputs, insufficient to meet the claims and are rationed by a rule whose proposals of division induce each agent to rank the coalitions...

I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has many applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of the commons. I show that information about other players'...

When opposing parties compete for a prize, the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner's reward. These spillovers can have substantial influence on the equilibrium behavior of participants in applications such as lobbying, warfare, labor tournaments,...

We study a model in which two players with opposing interests try to alter a status quo through instability-generating actions. We show that instability can be used to secure longer-term durable changes, even if it is costly to generate and does not generate short-term gains. In equilibrium,...