Where nations depend on resources originating outside their borders, such as river water, some believe that the resulting international tensions may lead to conflict. Homer-Dixon (1999) and Toset et al. (2000) argue such conflict is most likely between riparian neighbours, with a militarily...

In this paper, distribution and welfare effects of changes in block price systems are evaluated. A method is discussed to determine, for a Marshallian demand function, equivalent variation in case of a block price system. The method is applied to analyze welfare and distribution effects of...

We study label framing effects in linear public goods games. By accounting for heterogeneous frame connotation, we can identify individual framing effects. We test for such effects in a field experiment on irrigation management in India. Using membership of the water users association as a proxy...

Decentralization of irrigation management to local communities is often claimed to improve performance. The argument is that decentralization enhances the perceived legitimacy of irrigation management, which in turn increases the willingness of water users to cooperate and contribute to...

In a river claims problem, agents are ordered linearly, and they have both an initial water endowment as well as a claim to the total water resource. We provide characterizations of two solutions to this problem, using Composition properties which have particularly relevant interpretations for...

Violence and coercion are key to understanding economic and social interactions in any society. This premise was used by North et al. (2009) to distinguish three `patterns of social organization' that societies have used to solve the problem of violence. We model one of these, the `limited...

Violence is key to understanding human interaction and societal development. The natural state of societal organization is that a subset of the population, capable of mustering organized large-scale violence, forms an elite coalition that restrains both violence and coercive appropriation. We...