While folk theorems for dynamic renewable common pool resource games sustain cooperation as an equilibrium, the possibility of reverting to violence to appropriate the resource destroys the incentives to cooperate, because of the expectation of conflict when resources are sufficiently depleted....

Our paper explores the economic conditions that lead third parties to intervene in ongoing internal wars. We develop a formal model that ties together some of the main forces driving the decision to interfere in a civil war, including the economic benefits accruing from the intervention and the...

This paper aims at a better understanding of the conditions under which unequal rank or power positions may get permanently established through asymmetric gift exchange when a gift brings pride to the donor and shame to the recipient. Such a framework matches numerous observations reported in...

We propose a model where an autocrat rules over an ethnically divided society. The dictator carefully selects the tax rate over the subjects' production and the nation's natural resources to maximize his rent under the threat of a revolution. We show that it may be in the interest of a weak...

Power, defined as the ability to longer sustain a mutually damaging situation, determines both the outcome of the game and the way this outcome is reached. In our model, inspired from the Theory of moves (Brams, 1994), two agents, each facing two choices at their respective decision nodes, play...

This paper investigates the impact of land inequality on conflict intensity. A fundamental distinction with the existing literature lies in the nature of inequality under consideration. We investigate how land inequality across landlords only influences the intensity of the fight against a rebel...