I study the persuasive effects of slanted language, exploiting a ban on politically charged term “illegal immigrant” by Associated Press (AP) news wire. My empirical strategy combines timing with variation across media outlets in their baseline reliance AP copy. document sizable diffusion from copy to outlets. Moreover, individuals exposed through local show significantly lower support for rest...

This paper exploits the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within East Germany at end WWII to study political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi surrendered, 40 percent what would become authoritarian German Democratic Republic was initially under control but ceded less than two months later. Brief exposure increased protests during major 1953 uprising. We u...

We study the causes of sustained participation in political movements. To identify persistent effect protest participation, we randomly indirectly incentivize Hong Kong university students into an antiauthoritarian protest. role social networks, randomize this treatment’s intensity across major-cohort cells. find that incentives to attend one within a movement increase subsequent attendance but...

The Economics of Altruistic Punishment and the Demise of Cooperation Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this paper we explore the boundary condit...

Abstract Connecting to rule-makers in order to set favorable rules (lobbying) or paying government executives to bend the current rule (bribing) are the two main strategies for influencing government. This study in an evolutionary game model explain why bribing may become widespread while other states like compliance and cooperative lobbying are Pareto superior. The theoretical model is used ...

The amount of institutional intervention necessary to secure efficiency-enhancing cooperation in markets and organizations, in circumstances where interactions take place among essentially strangers, depends critically on the amount of information informal reputation mechanisms need transmit. Models based on subgame perfection find that the information necessary to support cooperation is recurs...

The subjective framework for reasoning is extended to incorporate the representation of unawareness in games. Both unawareness of actions and decision makers are modeled as well as reasoning about others’ unawareness. It is shown that a small grain of uncertainty about unawareness with rational decision makers can lead to cooperation in the finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma. JEL Classificati...

Laboratory evidence shows that when people have to argue for a given position, they persuade themselves about the position’s factual and moral superiority. Such self-persuasion limits potential of communication resolve conflict reduce polarization. We test this phenomenon in field setting, at international debating competitions randomly assign experienced motivated debaters one side topical mot...

This paper analyzes the impact of three termination rules for repeatedgame experiments. We compare treatments with a known finite end, an unknown end and two variants with a random termination rule. The termination rules do not significantly effect cooperation rates. JEL classification numbers: C72, C92, D21, D43

This paper suggests an indicator of power in weighted majority games. An indicator of power determines the ability of a voter to influence the outcomes of the voting bodies he belongs to. In a weighted majority game each voter is assigned a certain nonnegative real number weight and there is a positive real number quota satisfying a boundedness condition such that a group of voters can pass a r...