This paper aims to explain the rise and fall of communism by exploring the interplay between economic incentives and social preferences transmitted by ideology. We introduce inequality-averse and inefficiency-averse agents and analyze their conflict through the interaction between leaders with...

Citizens political participation to protests is a crucial issue for any political system, whether democratic or autocratic. Political systems have different ways of dealing with citizens’ protests, determining cost and benefit of public dissent, responding to public requests and allowing...

Natural resources are generally associated to negative effects on the political environment of a country. This paper explores the impact that oil revenues have on the establishment of a given political system. Based on previous literature, a political economy perspective is employed. A simple...

We analyze river sharing games in which a set of agents located along a river shares the available water. Using coalition theory, we find that the potential benefits of water trade may not be sufficient to make all agents in the river cooperate and acknowledge property rights as a prerequisite...

We introduce a noncooperative multilateral bargaining model for a network-restricted environment, in which players can communicate only with their neighbors. Each player strategically chooses the bargaining partners among the neighbors to buy out their communication links with upfront transfers....

Many aspects of social welfare are intrinsically multidimensional. Composite indices at-tempting to reduce this complexity to a unique measure abound in many areas of economics and public policy. Comparisons based on such measures depend, sometimes critically, on how the different dimensions of...

Promoting social information reporting and disclosure can promote sustainable banking. The paper aims to measure banking social sustainability by constructing a new interval-based composite indicator using the Thomson Reuters database. In this work, we propose an approach to constructing...

The analysis and measurement of poverty is a crucial and unsolved issue in the field of social science. This work aims to measure poverty as a multidimensional notion using a new composite indicator. However, subjective choices as different weighting schemes on the indicator's construction could...

We build a simple model of legal dualism in which a pro-poor legal reform, under certain conditions, causes the conflicting custom to go some way toward producing the change intended by the legislator. It then acts as an "outside anchor" that exerts a "magnet effect" on the custom. We illustrate...

Are natural resources a source of conflict or stability? Empirical studies demonstrate that rents from natural resources, and in particular oil, are an important source of civil war. Allegedly, resource rents attract rent seekers, which destabilize society. However, there is a large literature...