Scholars have highlighted how local elites can use their de facto power to capture democracy. This makes electoral competition particularly vulnerable in armed conflicts driven by politics. Would a reduction in politically motivated violence perpetrated by local elites promote electoral...

Many share the view that even though gross inequalities of wealth are something to worry about, it makes a difference whether or not they are accompanied by substantive equality of opportunity. If people or their children are able to climb up and down the economic hierarchy, inequality is no...

Scholars have highlighted how local elites can use their de facto power to capture democracy. This makes electoral competition particularly vulnerable in armed conflicts driven by politics. Would a reduction in politically motivated violence perpetrated by local elites promote electoral...

In this study, we experimentally analyze public goods games with an interior provision point. The role of ideology is tested in two different environments in which the political affiliation of group members is manipulated. While in the first experiment, participants’ ideology was no salient,...

The United States is unique among rich countries in the world in its level of contemporary mass incarceration, a massive social change that has reshaped the nature of inequality and social mobility. We have more than tripled the number of prison facilities since 1970. Despite employing nearly...

Informed voters are believed to be necessary for the well-functioning of elections. However, the puzzle is raised: Why are voters and politicians becoming more polarized despite the increased availability of information? We consider an election with policy-motivated candidates and partially...

A collective choice (or opinion) supported by a majority of individuals is challenged recurrently by a new one in a society. We consider a long-run evolution of collective choice under majority rules by stochastic evolutionary game theory. The Condorcet winner is uniquely a longrun equilibrium...

We study a mechanism design problem where allocation rule is randomized and transfers are contingent on outcomes. A sender reports his private information. An exogenous randomized allocation rule assigns an outcome based on the report. A central planner designs an outcome-contingent transfer to...

We consider the problem of allocating a social endowment of private goods among a group of n agents with linear preferences. We search for rules that satisfy three standard requirements. First is (Pareto-)efficiency. Second is the fairness requirement of “equal treatment of equals” (in...

Do politicians know enough about citizens to adequately represent them? Using original politician and citizen surveys in Pakistan, I show that politicians hold highly inaccurate beliefs about citizen preferences. Through a field experiment with a large political party, I find that politicians...