Suchergebnisse

This paper investigates whether Lockean first claimer property rights should be expected to emerge in anarchy. Individuals behind a veil of uncertainty about their future wealth decide independently whether to commit to using fcrce. Neither the contractarian hypothesis that a thicker veil of uncertainty supports more co‐operation nor Demsetz's hypothesis that well‐defined property rights emerge as the value of the externality from not having private property increases is unambiguously implied by the model.

Modern economics has largely ignored the issue of outright conflict as an alternative way of allocating goods, assuming instead the existence of well-defined property rights enforced by an undefined third party. And yet even in ostensibly peaceful market transactions, conflict exists as an outside option, sometimes constraining the outcomes reached through voluntary agreement. In this volume, economists offer a crucial rational-choice perspective on conflict, using methodological approaches that range from the game theoretic to the experimental.

During the past two centuries, western nations have successively ex-tended the voting franchise to citizens of lower income. We explain this process of democratization as a rational way for incumbent elites to in-crease their countries' power in international relations, as in a strategic game of international conflict handing over military spending decisions to citizens who face a lower tax cost of arming may confer a strategic delegation advantage. We find supporting empirical evidence in case Studies of franchise extensions in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.

During the past two centuries, western nations have successively extended the voting franchise to citizens of lower income. We explain this process of democratization as a rational way for incumbent elites to wage war effectively on other nations, as in a strategic game of international conflict handing over military spending decisions to citizens who face a lower tax cost of arming may confer a strategic delegation advantage. We find supporting empirical evidence in case studies of franchise extensions in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.

"We consider a two-player contest for a prize of common but uncertain value. We show that less resources are spent in equilibrium if one party is privately informed about the value of a prize than if either both agents are informed or neither agent is informed. Furthermore, the uninformed agent is ex ante strictly more likely to win the prize than is the informed agent." (author's abstract)

"We study the evolution of an economy where agents who are heterogeneous with respect to risk attitudes can either earn a certain income or enter a risky rent-seeking contest. We assume that agents behave rationally given their preferences, but that the population distribution of preferences evolves over time in response to material pay-offs. We show that, in particular, initial distributions with full support converge to stationary states where all types may still be present, risk lovers specialize in rent-seeking, and the available rents are perfectly dissipated." (author's abstract)