Damage created by an export embargo on exhaustible resources is typically much smaller than the foregone revenues. Sanctions prompt the sanctioned country to extract resources later. With competitive resource markets, sanctions create no costs-to any of the countries. With non-price takers, the...

Competition in which goods or rents are allocated as a function of the various efforts expended by players in trying to win these goods or rents is a very common phenomenon. A subset of examples comes from marketing, litigation, relative reward schemes or promotion tournaments in internal labor...

The standard contest model in which participants compete in a single dimension is well understood and documented. Multi-dimension extensions are possible but are liable to increase the complexity of the contest structure, mitigating one of its main advantages: simplicity. In this paper we...

Unlike produced commodities, the extraction and sale of oil or natural gas is an "asset swap": assets stored in the ground are converted into financial assets. The value of assets in the ground is reduced by the amount taken out and sold. This is important for assessing the coercive power of the...

We find experimental evidence that the decision problem of tax compliance changes if subjects’ declarations are not randomly assessed, but is based on their appearance as captured by pictures of their faces, even if the aggregate audit probability does not change. Some subjects may fear that...

Our experimental analysis of alliances in conflicts leads to three main findings. First, even in the absence of repeated interaction, direct contact or communication, free-riding among alliance members is far less pronounced than what would be expected from non-cooperative theory. Second, this...