This paper studies state failure and governance in two conflict-states in the Middle East: Iraq and Somalia. Iraq is currently undergoing a social experiment under which a new form of government is being constructed after the passage of autocratic rule. The government envisaged is a...

This paper models the instability of peace agreements, motivated by the empirical regularity with which peace agreements tend to break down following civil war. When war provides opportunities for profit to one side, or when other difficulties such as historical grievances exist, peace may...

We examine how group-specific differences in reservation wage, arising due to asymmetries in social entitlements, impact on distribution via the joint determination of class conflict between workers and employers, and ‘ethnic’ conflict among workers. We model a two-dimensional contest, where...

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...

In models of non-deterministic contest, players exert irreversible effort in order to increase their probability of winning a prize. The most prominent functional form of the win probability in the literature is the so-called "logitʺ contest success function. We provide a simple...

In this paper I consider the desirability of drugs that enhance cognitive abilities in the context of tournaments that are used as optimal labor contracts as in Lazear and Rosen (1981). Such drugs reduce the number of voluntary participants in a tournament, but increase individual and total...

I consider a model in which an asset owner must decide how much to invest in his asset mindful of the fact that an encroacher's valuation of the asset is increasing in the asset owner's investment. Due to incomplete property rights, the encroacher and asset owner engage in a contest over the...

We augment the canonical neoclassical model of trade to allow for interstate disputes over land, oil, water, or other resources. The costs of such disputes in terms of arming depend on the trade regime in place. Under either autarky or free trade, the larger country (in terms of factor...

This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a...

I study a two-period model of conflict with two combatants and a third party who is an ally of one of the combatants. The third party is fully informed about the type of her ally but not about the type of her ally's enemy. There is a signaling game between the third party and her ally's enemy...