A good reputation can be an effective bond for honest behavior in a community of traders if members of the community know how others have behaved in the past - even if any particular pair of traders meets only infrequently. In a large community, it would be impossibly costly for traders to be...

We develop a positive theory of kleptocracy, in which the incumbent ruler's concern about his survival probability can induce him to pursue relatively benevolent policies. But, this effect can lower the equilibrium tax rate only until the time-consistency requirement becomes a binding constraint...

Extrapolating from some simple game-theoretic models, this paper suggests that invoking Section 301 will tend to shift the terms of agreement in the US's favor. This shift will be larger (a) the greater the harm to the targeted country from having its access to the US market limited; (b) the...

The early literature on rent seeking presumed that total expenditures in the rent-seeking process would equal the value of a contested prize. Subsequent analysis has shown, however, that a number of circumstances give rise to underdissipation of the contested rent-imperfectly discriminating...

This paper develops a methodology for calculating the expected completed lengths of U.S. congressmen's stays in office. In addition, it demonstrates how this methodology can be used to forecast the seniority structure of future Congresses. One of the major empirical findings of this paper is...

Sometimes a group of people want to hire some agent (a monetary authority, for instance) to force them to cooperate with one another. This can cause problems, not only of the standard principal-agent type, but also of inconsistency, which appears here as renegotiation. The group faces a conflict...