We examine two factors that help explain the prevalence of conflict in low-income countries: that adversaries cannot enforce long-term contracts in arms, and that open conflict alters the future strategic positions of the adversaries differently than does peace. Using an infinite horizon model,...

Economic growth has not led to a decline in religion despite past predictions that it would. I use a formal model of religious competition to show how economic growth produces counteracting effects on religious participation in an open religious market, while economic growth will have little...

According to existing theory, religion thrives when groups overcome the free-rider problem in the production of religious goods. This paper explains, however, that allowing some free-riding is necessary in a dynamic setting. If an individual only contributes when she has high religious capital,...

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the scientific study of happiness. Economists, in particular, find that happiness increases in income but decreases in income aspirations, and this work prompts examination of how aspirations form and adapt over time. This paper presents...

We examine a conflictual setting in which adversaries cannot contract on an enforcement variable (arms) and where the future strategic positions of adversaries are very different when there is open conflict than when there is settlement. We show that, as the future becomes more important in this...

The goal of this paper is to study how informational frictions affect asset liquidity in OTC markets in a laboratory setting. The experiments replicate an OTC market similar to the one used in monetary and financial economics (Shi, 1995; Trejos and Wright, 1995; Duffie, Garleanu, and Pedersen, 2005):...

We examine the game theoretic properties of a model of crime first introduced by Short, Brantingham, and D'Orsogna (Short et al. 2010) as the SBD Adversarial Game. We identify the rationalizable strategies and one-shot equilibria under mul- tiple equilibrium refinements. We further show that...

Many social and economic networks emerge among actors that only partially observe the network when forming network ties. We ask: what types of network architectures form when actors have limited observation, and does limited observation lead to less efficient structures? We report numerous...

Why do legal disputes ever go to trial? Prior research emphasizes the role of mistakes, irrationalities, or asymmetric information because rational litigants with complete or symmetric information should choose pre-trial settlements over the costs and risks of trial. Using a dynamic...