We study the design of randomized controlled experiments in environments where outcomes are significantly affected by unobserved effort decisions taken by the subjects (agents). While standard randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are internally consistent, the unobservability of effort provision...

We examine the determinants of cooperation and the effectiveness of deterrence when fear is a motive for conflict. We contrast results obtained in a complete information setting with those obtained in a setting with strategic risk, where players have different information about their...

This article revisits the relationship between income per capita and civil conflict. We begin by documenting that the empirical literature identifies two different patterns. First, poor countries have a higher propensity to suffer from civil war. Second, civil war occurs when countries suffer...

We consider a game between a principal, an agent, and a monitor in which the principal would like to rely on messages by the monitor to target intervention against a misbehaving agent. The difficulty is that the agent can credibly threaten to retaliate against likely whistleblowers in the event...

We contrast the relationship between predation and the savings of its potential victim in two different simple models. In the first model, predation is an exogenous event in which savings are expropriated with some fixed probability. In such a setting, the higher the probability of expropriation...