We provide a competitive theory of middlemen or entrepreneurs who develop brand-name reputations necessary to overcome product quality moral hazard problems, embedded in a Heckscher-Ohlin model of North-South trade. Agents with heterogeneous entrepreneurial abil- ities sort into different...

We consider mechanism design in which message sets are restricted owing to communication costs, preventing full revelation of information. A principal contracts with multiple agents each supplying a one-dimensional good at a privately known cost. We characterize optimal mechanisms subject to...

In a one-principal two-agent model with adverse selection and collusion among agents, we show that delegating to one agent the right to subcontract with the other agent always earns lower profit for the principal compared with centralized contracting. Delegation to an intermediary is also not in...

We study a competitive theory of middlemen with brand-name reputations necessary to overcome product quality moral hazard problems. Agents with heterogeneous abilities sort into different sectors and occupations. Middleman margins do not equalize across sectors if production of different goods...

While the theoretical literature maintains that strategic coordination is one of the keys to successful rebellion, anti-governmental campaigns are not necessarily synchronized across rebel groups in observed civil wars. To resolve this discrepancy, we develop a dynamic and spatial model of...

This article develops a model of random matching with costly monitoring to demonstrate that the threat of ethnic conflict can function to create an in-group policing mechanism which helps enforce inter-ethnic social order. Instead of regarding ethnic conflict as a form of collective penalty on...

Political conflicts have been extensively studied by political scientists, but criminal conflicts have received much less attention, especially by theorists in the field. Focusing on the latter type of conflict, we address why an individual crime across an ethnic or tribal border can lead to...