This paper examines interaction in the absence of property rights when agents face a trade-off between productive and coercive activities. In this setting, conflict is not the necessary outcome of one-time interaction and cooperation is consistent with domination of one agent over another. Other...

Tournaments, conflicts, and rent-seeking have been modeled as contests in which participants exert effort to increase their probability of winning a prize. A Contest Success Function (CSF) provides each player's probability of winning as a function of all players' efforts. In this paper, the...

We examine the effect of insecure property and its accompanying enforcement costs on the efficiency of exchange. Because of the large enforcement costs that may be induced by the expectation of exchange, limited settlement without exchange may be "ex ante" superior for an adversary or even...

In a contest, participants spend money or effort to increase their chances of winning a prize. The authors examine primarily the following question: Could the timid (the more risk averse) have a better chance of winning in contests? Under limited liability the answer is always positive. In the...

We examine a setting in which property rights are initially ambiguously defined. Whether the parties go to court to remove the ambiguity or bargain and settle privately, they incur enforcement costs. When the parties bargain, a version of the Coase theorem holds. Despite the additional costs of...

When a resource like oil is domestically contested, trade patters and welfare can be very different than when property rights are costlessly enforced. Whereas (small-country) importers of the contested resource gain unambiguously relative to autarky, exporters of the contested resource lose...

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...