Recent progress in the development of efficient computational algorithms to price financial derivatives is summarized. A first algorithm is based on a path integral approach to option pricing, while a second algorithm makes use of a neural network parameterization of option prices. The accuracy...

We study countries choosing armament levels and then whether or not to go to war. We show that if the costs of war are not overly high or low, then all equilibria must involve "dove," "hawk," and "deterrent" strategies and the probability of war is positive (but less than one) in any given...

The adoption of mandatory gender quotas in party lists has been a subject of discussion in many countries. Since any reform obviously requires the approval of a (sometimes qualified) majority of incumbent legislators' votes, keeping an eye on incumbents' interests and incentives in different...

We evaluate how traditional parties may respond to populist parties on issues that are particularly fitting for populist messages. The testing ground is the 2020 Italian referendum on the reduction of members of Parliament. We implement a large-scale field experiment, with almost one million...

Legislative and regulatory reforms often contain various forms of complexity – multiple contingencies, exemptions and alike. Complexity may be desirable if it better satisfies the needs of diverse political constituencies and if such a benefit is more important than the potential corresponding...

We examine how natural resource location, rent sharing and fighting capacities of different groups matter for ethnic conflict. A new type of bargaining failure due to multiple types of potential conflicts (and hence multiple threat points) is identified. The theory predicts conflict to be more...

This paper brings mechanism design to the study of conflict resolution in international relations. We determine when and how unmediated communication and mediation reduce the ex ante probability of conflict, in a simple game where conflict is due to asymmetric information. Unmediated...