We analyse interethnic cooperation in an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma when members of one group are unable to target punishment towards individual defectors from the other group. We first show that indiscriminate outgroup punishment may sustain cooperation in this setting. Our main...

Why do women hit the glass ceiling? Women are hired, but then fail to rise through the ranks. We propose a novel explanation for this pattern, namely preference- and belief-free discrimination. In our setting, an employer can increase effort by inducing differential value distributions for a...

We study the group stability of collective decision making when society is organized according to a non directed graph, and groups' payoff possibilities are given by a partition function. We focus on the stability properties of hierarchical organizations, formally described by minimally...

Exploiting a unique empirical setting, 1,000 vendors in 90 traditional food markets in Lima, we document that historic social ties among market founders are associated, decades later, with stricter formal (third party) enforcement of market rules, more collective action, and the greater...

This paper analyses issue linkage as a way to increase co-operation on issues where incentives to free-ride are strong. The goal is to determine under what conditions players prefer to link negotiations on two different issues rather than to negotiate on the two issues separately. Suppose that...

In this paper we show how the Kolm triangle method, which is a standard tool for visualizing allocations in a public good economy, can also be used to provide a diagrammatical exposition of matching mechanisms and their effects on public good supply and welfare. In particular, we describe, on...