We investigate the impact of the political representation of minority groups on the incidence of ethnic conflict in India. We code data on Hindu-Muslim violence and Muslim political representation in India and leverage quasi-random variation in legislator religion generated by the results of...

How do majority groups respond to a narrowing of inequality in racially polarized environments? We study this question by examining the effects of the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency created after the U.S. Civil War to provide aid to former slaves and launch institutional reform in the South. We...

Do Kenyans vote according to ethnic identities or policy interests? Based on results from a national probability sample survey conducted in the first week of December 2007, this article shows that, while ethnic origins drive voting patterns, elections in Kenya amount to more than a mere ethnic...

We model a rent-seeking contest among two 'identity ideologues', differentially located along a uni-dimensional identity continuum, and a 'mercenary', who can choose any location in-between. The contest jointly awards an identity-relevant good ('religion') and an identity-irrelevant good...

We analyze Nash equilibria of share and probabilistic contests when players have distributional preferences. If players are sufficiently similar, distributional preferences create multiple equilibria. For the case of only mildly heterogeneous players, equilibrium effort can be lower as well as...

Die Abwahl einer Regierung sowie die Entmachtung eines Diktators per Revolution können daran scheitern, dass kein individueller Teilnahmeanreiz besteht. Als Lösungsmöglichkeit wird ein strategischer Ansatz entwickelt, der zeigt, dass sich die Kollektivgutproblematik bei der Wahlteilnahme als...

This paper considers terrorism as an extortion activity. It uses tools from the theory of extortion and from conflict theory to describe how terrorism works, why terrorism is a persistent phenomenon, why terrorism is a violent phenomenon, and how retaliation affects the outcome. The analysis...

This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. We characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information. The type of one player is common knowledge. The type of the other player is drawn from a...

The formation of an alliance in conflict situations is known to suffer from a collective action problem and from the potential of internal conflict. We show that budget constraints of an intermediate size can overcome this strong disadvantage and explain the formation of alliances.

This paper extends the axiomatic characterization of contest success functions of Skaperdas (1996) and Clark and Riis (1998) to contests between groups. – Contest ; conflict ; axiom ; group