Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism proposes a strikingly original thesis—that capitalism first emerged in Arabia, not in late medieval Italian city states as is commonly assumed. Early Islam made a seminal but largely unrecognized contribution to the history of economic thought; it is the...

We consider a differential game of a conflict between two factions who both have a desire to exact revenge. We show that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, the desire for revenge need not lead to escalation of conflicts. Surprisingly, in the open-loop equilibrium, the weaker faction exerts a...