This paper expands the micro-foundations of the traditional greed and grievance non-cooperative model of civil conflict between a government and a rebel group. First, the paper's model allows for greed and grievance to be orthogonal, so that they may affect each other. Second, the model allows...

We analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e.shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) affect the intensity of social conflict. We see conflict phenomena such as crime and civil war as involving resource appropriation activities. We show that not all shocks that could make society richer...

I investigate numerically the following question: Given that individuals with different wages disagree over the optimal labour-income tax schedule, how would such disagreements be affected if society restricted itself to using linear tax schedules? I find that there would be (i) a decrease in...

While the game-theoretic analysis of conflict is often based on the assumption of multiplicative noise, additive noise such as considered by Hirshleifer (1989) may be equally plausible depending on the application. In this paper, we examine the equilibrium set of the n-player difference-form...

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 has recently been re-formulated by Ray and Vohra (2015)....

We analyze binary choice models in communication networks, in which both, the formation of links in the network as well as the action choices are endogenous. We provide a complete characterization of the equilibrium action choices and networks, where agents choose their strategies - actions and...

The symmetric two-player Hirshleifer (1989) contest is shown to admit a unique equilibrium. The support of the equilibrium strategy is finite and includes, in particular, the zero expenditure level. We also establish a lower bound for the cardinality of the support and an upper bound for the...

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...

We characterize the equilibrium set of the n-player Hirshleifer contest with homogeneous valuations. A symmetric equilibrium always exists. It necessarily corresponds to multilateral peace for sufficient noise and uses finite-support randomized strategies otherwise. Asymmetric equilibria are...

We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Motivated by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital, from social and political participation to interpersonal...