We examine two factors that help explain the prevalence of conflict in low-income countries: that adversaries cannot enforce long-term contracts in arms, and that open conflict alters the future strategic positions of the adversaries differently than does peace. Using an infinite horizon model,...

We examine how globalization affects trade patterns and welfare when conflict prevails domestically. We do so in a simple model of trade, in which a natural resource like oil is contested by competing groups using real resources ("guns"). Thus, conflict is viewed as ultimately stemming from...

We argue that the costs of domestic and transnational insecurity are large and economically significant and that they may vary with the trade regime of a country. Then, in evaluating trade regimes, the gains from trade need to be weighed against the change in the security costs they induce....

In this chapter, we review the recent literature on conflict and appropriation. Allowing for the possibility of conflict, which amounts to recognizing the possibility that property rights are not perfectly and costlessly enforced, represents a significant departure from the traditional paradigm...

Civil wars and conflict can be understood from an economic point of view only if there is incomplete contracting. I examine such settings and first discuss sources of incomplete contracting, from geography and ethnic and social distance to external interventions due to geopolitics or the...

I examine the determinants of conflict and settlement by embedding probabilistic contests in a bargaining framework. Different costly enforcement efforts (e.g., arming, litigation expenditures) induce different disagreement points and Pareto frontiers. After examining the incentives for...

Contest functions (alternatively, contest success functions) determine probabilities of winning and losing as a function of contestants’ eort. They are used widely in many areas of economics that employ contest games, from tournaments and rent-seeking to conflict and sports. We first examine...

We explore the severity of an ongoing dispute over a productive resource within a country that participates in world trade. In addition to arming, the contending groups in our setting choose either to engage in destructive conflict or to settle their dispute peacefully. Our central objective is...

We examine the game theoretic properties of a model of crime first introduced by Short, Brantingham, and D'Orsogna (Short et al. 2010) as the SBD Adversarial Game. We identify the rationalizable strategies and one-shot equilibria under mul- tiple equilibrium refinements. We further show that...