Peer production projects like Wikipedia have inspired voluntary associations, collectives, social movements, and scholars to embrace open online collaboration as a model of democratic organization. However, many peer production projects exhibit entrenched leadership and deep inequalities, suggesting that they may not fulfill democratic ideals. Instead, peer production projects may conform to Ro...

OLIGARCHY IN THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC LIFE OF SELECTED POST-SOVIET STATES: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE The oligarchization of economic and political life in the countries created after collapse USSR is one main factors determining forms dynamics transformation post-Soviet countries. Over past thirty years, oligarchs area have actively participated distribution state property more. Thanks to acqui...

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of efficient truthful common-agency equilibria ha...

This paper studies the endogenous emergence of political regimes, in particular democracy or oligarchy, in heterogeneous societies in which institutions do not ensure political commitments. Democracy emerges if the ruling coalition that makes political decisions represents the majority of individuals of the population, while oligarchy emerges when the political decisions are made by a minority ...

This paper analyses the dynamics of inequality, democratization and economic development in a political economy model of growth where education is both the engine of growth and a determinant of political participation. In a context with imperfect capital markets, we investigate the incentives for an educated oligarchy to subsidize the poor’s education and to initiate a democratic transition. We...