Admissibility, i.e. the deletion of weakly dominated strategies, is a highly controversia1 solution concept for non cooperative games. This paper proposes a complete theory of weak dominance and, contrary to almost al1 the literature on this topic, it provides positive results on foundations of...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the joint work of two mechanisms that might constrain autocratic rulers: the threat of a coup by the political elite and of a revolution by the citizens. Our results will help explain a well-established and crucial fact, that is, that autocracies are far...

The aim of this paper is to provide a specific point of view on the protests that have characterized the Arab countries from December 2010 and are still going on. To understand some of the reasons behind these events, I propose a sequential game with asymmetric information on the likelihood of...

Why was the same state in China able to promote economic growth in the reform era but not in the previous thirty years? In this paper we focus on a speci…c aspect that might help the search for a comprehensive explanation: the speci…c institutional arrangement that induced autocratic...

Do citizens have a role in constraining the policies of autocratic governments? Usually political and economic literature models autocracy as if citizens have no role in constraining a leader's behavior, when in fact autocratic governments are afraid of potential citizen revolts. In this paper...

Bringing scholars and policymakers to the frontiers of research and addressing the critical issues of the day, the book presents original important new theoretical and empirical results. The distinguished contributors include: P. Agrel, K. Alexander, J. Crémer, X. Dassiou, G. Deltas, F. Etro,...

We investigate regulation as the outcome of a bargaining process between a regulator and a regulated firm. The regulator is required to monitor the firm’s costs and reveal its information to a political principal (Congress). In this setting, we explore the scope for collusion between the...

This paper develops a new argument for the Chinese Communist Party´s success in implementing the post-Mao economic reform. We build a three-player political agency model, showing that the credibility of the threats of deposition by the selectorate and of revolts by citizens are both crucial...