We develop a principal-agent model where a police officer trades off investigating and patrolling in a rich strategic environment where civilians choose between producing and stealing (and also whom to steal from). The equilibrium numbers of criminals and producers, punished or not, are...

Cities and marketplaces are central to economic development, but we know little about why such agglomerations initially form. I argue that evolutionary forces select for agglomerations when individuals' desire to spatially coordinate exchange in complex environments. To test this idea, I perform...

Is there more violence in areas with many small countries or only a single large one? I create a unifying framework where both internal and external contestants engage in conflict, and summarize how the spatial configuration of countries affects all types of violence with the...

This paper introduces a simple application of contest theory that neatly captures how Boulding’s “Loss of Strength Gradient” determines the geographic extent of territory. We focus on the “supply side” of territorial conflict, showing how the costs of initiating and escalating conflict...