This paper attemps to understand a dilemma embedded in the Declaration of Independence: the expected costs of war against Britain far exceeded any possible war benefits, if these are construed simply as the removal of colonial taxation.

AbstractWe construct a stochastic model of a legislature with an endogenously determined seniority system. We model the behavior of the legislators as well as their constituents as an infinitely repeated divide-the-dollar game. The game has a stationary equilibrium with the property that the...