A Dynamic Model of Conflict and Cooperation

We introduce a common-pool contest into a continuous-time, differential game setting to model the dynamic behavior of agents facing a trade-off between socially productive activities and appropriation. We are able to identify multiple Markov perfect equilibrium strategies that are nonlinear in a state space, thus leading the economy to a state where epartial cooperationf occurs. We show that such cooperation can be seen as a response to conflict. We also discuss the consequences of changes in the effectiveness of appropriation, the number of contenders, and the rate of time preferences on contest equilibria.