This paper develops a positive analysis of alliance formation that builds on a simple economic model featuring a “winner-take-all” contest for control of some resource. When an alliance forms, members pool their efforts in that contest and,if successful, apply the resource to a joint...

Using a formal general equilibrium framework, this paper analyzes how sanctions imposed on the contestants in civil conflict affect the welfare of these contestants and the allocation of resources to conflict. It is shown that weak sanctions can hurt the contestant they are supposed to help,...

I examine the determinants of conflict and settlement by embedding probabilistic contests in a bargaining framework. Different costly enforcement efforts (e.g., arming, litigation expenditures) induce different disagreement points and Pareto frontiers. After examining the incentives for...

The story of conflict and cooperation has started millions of years ago, and now it is everywhere: In biology, computer science, economics, political science, and psychology. Examples include wars, airline alliances, trade, oligopolistic cartels, the evolution of species and genes, and team...

Peace economics can be defined as the use of economics to understand the causes and effects of violent conflict in the international system and the ways that conflict can be avoided, managed, or resolved. This chapter surveys major subject areas of peace economics, highlighting seminal as well...

This paper theoretically assesses the role that uncertainty plays in the intensity of conflicts. The standard two-player rent-seeking contest model (Tullock, 1980) is extended to allow for privately known subjective values of the prize. The conflict is modeled as a Bayesian game on which each...

This paper builds a dynamic theory of secessions, conflictual or peaceful, analyzing the forward looking interaction between groups in a country. The proposed framework allows us to jointly address several key stylized facts on secession, and generates several novel predictions. We find that if...

We examine settings - such as litigation, labor relations, or arming and war - in which players first make non-contractible up-front investments to improve their bargaining position and gain advantage for possible future conflict. Bargaining is efficient ex post, but we show that a player may...

The story of conflict and cooperation has started millions of years ago, and now it is everywhere: In biology, computer science, economics, political science, and psychology. Examples include wars, airline alliances, trade, oligopolistic cartels, corruption, the evolution of species and genes,...

We examine settings - such as litigation, labor relations, or arming and war - in which players first make non-contractible up-front investments to improve their bargaining position and gain advantage for possible future conflict. Bargaining is efficient ex post, but we show that a player may...