This essay develops an economic theory of insurrections. The decision-making agents in this theory are an incumbent ruler, a potential leader of an insurrection, and a large number of peasant or worker families. The essay distinguishes insurrections that attempt only to appropriate current...

Rothschild and Stiglitz have shown than insurance markets and other markets in which an adverse-selection problem exists cannot have Nash-type pooling or subsidized separating equilibria and are unlikely to have Nash-type unsubsidized separating equilibria. Wilson, Miyazaki, and Riley have...