We examine why heterogenous communities may fail to provide public goods. Current work characterizes sanctioning free-riders as an under-supplied public good. We argue that often free-riders can be punished by the coordinated action of a group. This punishment can be profitable, and need not be...

Costly signaling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation for participation in religion and ritual. But if the signal's cost is too small, freeriders will send the signal and behave selflshly later. Effective signaling may then be prohibitively costly. If the average level of...

In existing models of direct democratic institutions, the median voter beneï¬ts, but representative politicians are harmed since their policy choices can be overridden. This is a puzzle, since representative politicians were instrumental in creating these institutions. I build a model of...

We examine discrimination against outgroups in the context of the December 2008 riots in Greece after the killing of a 15-year-old student by a special police agent. We examine students’ allocations between themselves and others, including police, in modified Dictator games, allowing us to...

Voters in democracies can learn from the experience of neighbouring states: about policy in a direct democracy (`policy experimentation'), about the quality of their politicians in a representative democracy (`yardstick competition'). Learning between states creates spillovers from policy...

Surprisingly high levels of within-group cooperation are observed in conflict situations. Experiments confirm that external threats lead to higher cooperation. The psychological literature suggests proximate explanations in the form of group processes, but does not explain how these processes...

Previous theories of globalization have examined factor mobility’s effect on the political conflict between social classes. But factor mobility also increases competition between state rulers in providing services for citizens. I ask how this interstate competition affects the process of...

Why did representative politicians introduce direct democratic reforms, thus binding their own hands? This paper presents a formal model in which (1) voters are uncertain about their representative’s preferences; (2) direct and representative elections are substitute methods for voters to...

Field studies of conflict report cycles of mutual revenge between groups, often linked to perceptions of intergroup injustice. We test the hypothesis that people are predisposed to reciprocate against groups. In a computerized laboratory experiment, subjects who were harmed by a partner’s...

In the tight budgetary conditions following the 2008 financial crisis, governments have proposed saving money by reforming public services. This paper argues that tight budget constraints make reform harder by introducing an information problem. Governments are uncertain about bureaucratic...