If civil war is a contest for popular support, why would a government ever embark on a policy of disproportionate force and mass killing? The logic of civilian defection expects such an approach to easily backfire, as civilians respond to massive losses by opposing the side that inflicted them....

Property rights are undoubtedly among the most important institutions for economic efficiency. Still, by looking at reality we usually see property rights only imperfectly enforced. In this paper we identify uncertainty faced by an enforcer to be sufficient to explain this observation. This...

In this paper, we present a model of deliberation based on Rawls’s political liberalism. Our formalization gives a new perspective on his political theory. Moreover, we obtain quantitative results on political deliberation under Rawlsian rules. Finally, we elaborate two arguments in favor of...

To forecast decisions in conflict situations, experts are often advised to figuratively stand in the other person’s shoes. We refer to this as “role thinking” because, in practice, the advice is to think about how other protagonists will view the situation in order to predict their...

The aim of this paper is to interpret the relationships between information networks and the massacres in Colombia. Over a period of paramilitary violence networks of informants were used with a strategic purpose. In fact, the paramilitaries were preparing each slaughter counting information...

This article proposes a reading of the armed conflict from an evolutionary design that takes into account the concept of private protection agencies in the works of Schelling/Nozick/Gambetta. Their aim is to assess the dynamics of conflict and changes from its author’s scientific output. A...

This paper analyzes choice-theoretic costly enforcement in an intertemporal contracting model with a differentially informed investor and entrepreneur. An intertemporal contract is modeled as a mechanism is which there is limited commitment to payment and enforcement decisions. The goal of the...

This work develops an abstract, theory-founded understanding of organization-internal infor­mation security. For this purpose, established knowledge from the field of information security is restructured on the basis of two different dimensions: The historical dimension distinguishes three...