I analyse firms organisational choices when they face uncertainty about institutional conditions in foreign locations with heterogeneous final good producers and incomplete contracts. As firms learn about the conditions abroad, the increasing offshoring activity increases competition in the...

The paper discusses the role of communication technologies in reducing the costs of using market exchange. It analyzes the comparative effect of new technologies on transactions which take place within and outside the firm using Coase’s postulate of the size of the firm. Technologically...

Intrinsic motivation of workers may arise from different individual motives. While some workers care about the mission of an organization and derive an intrinsic benefit from advancing this mission ("good" workers), others derive pleasure from some form of destructive or anti-social behavior...

This paper relates cultural distance and governance structures. We suggest a model of cultural evolution that captures the idiosyncratic socialization dynamics taking place in groups of communicating and interacting agents. Based on these processes, cultural distance within and between groups or...

Initiating a conflict is an investment in social, political or economic change. The decision to attack is sequential in time, irreversible and, more important, includes highly uncertain and erratic threats and opportunities yet completely disregarded in confict theory. In this dynamic model of...

We develop a general framework to study contests, containing the well-known models of Tullock (1980) and Lazear & Rosen (1981) as special cases. The contest outcome depends on players' effort and skill, the latter being subject to symmetric uncertainty. The model is tractable, because a...

We study the role of an imbalance in fighting strengths when players bargain in the shadow of conflict. Our experimental results suggest: In a simple bargaining game with an exogenous mediation proposal, the likelihood of conflict is independent of the balance of power. If bargaining involves...

This contribution studies the impact of modernization on the onset of Islamist conflict. To capture the multi-dimensional phenomenon of modernization, we create a unique modernization index. Our empirical analysis for 154 countries for the 1971-2006 period provides robust evidence that...

We study a model of war in which the outcome of the war is uncertain from the perspective of the involved countries not because of luck on the battlefield (as in standard models) but because of their lack of information about their opponents. In our model there are two countries characterized by...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...