This paper explores how wealth and inequality can affect self-governed solutions to commons dilemmas by constraining group cooperation. It reports a series of experiments in the field where subjects are actual commons users. Household data about the participants’ context explain statistically the usually observed wide variation found within and across groups in similar experiments. Participants...

We ask whether attitudes toward government play a causal role in the evasion of US personal income taxes. As turnover elections move voters partisan counties into and out alignment with party president, we find (i) taxpayers report more easily evaded forms income; (ii) suspect EITC claims decrease; (iii) audits triggered found to owe additional tax decrease. Coupled evidence that leads favorabl...

We construct both monotonic and non-monotonic symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibria for a two-player all-pay contest with binary types and correlated information structures. We also employ a class of parametric distributions to illustrate our equilibrium construction explicitly and to derive some comparative statics results. JEL classi…cations: C72, D44, D72, D82.

This paper considers political credibility of allocations in settings with dynamic private information. It embeds a benchmark dynamic moral environment into political economy games which feature repeated voting over mechanisms. Optimal politically credible allocations are shown to solve virtual planning problems with social discount factors in excess of the private one. JEL codes: C73, D72, D82...

Conditions are identified which guarantee the strategic equivalence of rentseeking, innovation, and patent-race games. Our results permit one to apply theorems and results intended for rent-seeking games to other games, and vice versa. We conclude with several examples that highlight the practical utility of our results. (JEL Numbers: D00, L00, D72;

This paper studies, theoretically and experimentally, the effects of overconfidence fake news on information aggregation quality democratic choice in a common-interest setting. We show that exacerbates adverse widespread misinformation (i.e., news). then analyze richer models allow for partisanship, targeted intended to sway public opinion, signals correlated across voters (due media ownership ...

This paper studies the effects of endogenous party formation on political platforms. It develops a model in which parties allow like-minded citizens to, first, share cost running public election and, second, coordinate policy platform. The characterizes set equilibria with two competing and one uncontested party. In two-party equilibria, distance between both platforms is always positive but li...

We study optimal policy experimentation by a committee. consider dynamic bargaining game in which committee members choose either risky reform or safe alternative each period. When no redistribution is allowed, the unique equilibrium outcome generically inefficient. allowed (even small amounts), there always exists an that supports for any voting rule without veto players. With players, however...

We develop a dynamic model of political competition between two groups that differ in their subjective the data generating process for common outcome. One group has simpler than other as they ignore some relevant policy variables. show cycles must arise and simple world views—which can be interpreted populist views—imply extreme choices. Periods which those with more complex govern increase spe...

This chapter gives a flavour of recent theoretical work on coalition formation and political parties. I survey recent work on both pre-election coalition formation and post election coalition (or government) formation. A number of alternative rationales for the formation of parties are compared with the help of some illustrative examples. JEL Classification:C71, C72, C78, D71, D72, D78