This paper experimentally examines behavior in a two-player game of attack and defense of a weakest-link network of targets, in which the attacker's objective is to successfully attack at least one target and the defender's objective is diametrically opposed. We apply two benchmark contest...

We study how conflict in contest games is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our motivation stems from the analysis of socio-political conflict. The theoretical prediction is that conflict expenditures are independent of group size and...

This paper expands the micro-foundations of the traditional greed and grievance non-cooperative model of civil conflict between a government and a rebel group. First, the paper's model allows for greed and grievance to be orthogonal, so that they may affect each other. Second, the model allows...

We examine the effect of the interaction between resource rents and democracy on corruption for a panel of 29 Sub-Saharan countries during the period from 1985 to 2007. We find that higher resource rents lead to more corruption and that the effect is significantly stronger in less democratic...

In this paper I analyze the economic incentives that govern the strategic relationship between the government and the independent media using a consistent analytical framework. The analysis focuses on the extent to which the ‘free’ press can act as a deterrent to corruption in governance. I...

I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has many applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of the commons. I show that information about other players'...

A Theory of Auditability for Allocation Mechanisms Managing military operations across and between teams of partner nations remains a first-order challenge to security and development during conflict. NATO, under the umbrella of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), brought...

This paper argues that corruption patterns are endogenous to political structures. Thus, corruption can be systemic and planned rather than decentralized and coincidental. In an economic system without law or property rights, a kleptocratic state may arise as a predatory hierarchy from a state...

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

Group-based identity undermines democracy by impeding democratic change of government. A substantial literature has therefore studied how to make democracy consistent with group identity. We contribute to this literature by introducing the role of group decisiveness into voting incentives and...