This paper analyzes secession and group formation in a general model of contest inspired by Esteban and Ray (1999). This model encompasses as special cases rent seeking contests and policy conflicts, where agents lobby over the choice of a policy in a one-dimensional policy space. We show that...

This paper analyzes the formation of networks when players choose how much to invest in each relationship. We suppose that players have a fixed endowment that they can allocate across links, and in the baseline model, suppose that link strength is an additively separable and convex function of...

This paper examines how domestic violence may be used as an instrument to extract large transfers from a spouse's family. It is based on a case-study of three villages in Southern India, conducted by the authors, that combines qualitative and survey data. Based on the ethnographic evidence, we...

We examine the determinants of expenditures on wedding celebrations by rural Indian families. Fieldwork, using open-ended interviews and focus group discussions in two villages in Karnataka State in Southern India, suggests that wedding celebrations are to a large extent a signal of social...

Theoretical models of government formation in political science usually assume that the head of state is non-strategic. In this paper, we analyze the power of an agenda setter who chooses the order in which players are recognized to form coalitions in simple games. We characterize those sets of...

This paper studies the core of combined games, obtained by summing two coalitional games. It is shown that the set of balanced transferable utility games can be partitioned into equivalence classes of component games to determine whether the core of the combined game coincides with the sum of...