In a model of evolution driven by con ict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the in uence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions di er in their exclusiveness we nd that these hegemonies will be ine ciently extractive in the sense of having ine ciently high taxes, high compensation for state...

When matching mechanisms yield unstable assignments, unraveling can lead participants to abandon them. This is thought to explain why, empirically, the stable Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism persists where unstable alternatives, such as priority mechanisms, do not. Theory, however, tells us that both DA and priority mechanisms can yield unstable matches in incomplete information equilibrium....

We study the emergence of urban self-governance in late medieval period. focus on England after Norman Conquest 1066, building a novel comprehensive dataset 554 towns. During Commercial Revolution (twelfth to thirteenth centuries), many merchant towns obtained Farm Grants: right self-governed tax collection and law enforcement. Self-governance, turn, was stepping stone for parliamentary represe...

A revolutionary entrepreneur strategically chooses the revolutionary agenda to maximize the likelihood of revolution. Citizens have different preferences and can contribute varying degrees of support. This presents the revolutionary entrepreneur with a tradeoff between extensive and intensive margins of support. We show: (1) Extremists exert a disproportionate influence over the revolutionary a...

Definitive judgment about the quality of decision making is made difficult by twin problems of measurement and identification. A measure of decision-making quality is hard to formalize, to quantify, and to make practical for use in a variety of choice environments; and it is difficult to distinguish differences in decision-making quality from unobserved differences in preferences, information, ...

The purpose of this paper is to review the main literature that has analyzed the channels through which institutions influence economic change, hence development. The interest for this topic arises from the relatively recent consensus that has emerged among scholars and policy makers in considering institutions a key factor shaping the outcome of the economic game. The aim is pursued by discuss...

A Constitutional Theory of the Family The paper re-examines the idea that a family can be viewed as a community governed by a self-enforcing constitution, and extends existing results in two directions. First, it identifies circumstances in which a constitution is renegotiation-proof. Second, it introduces parental altruism. The behavioural and policy implications are illustrated by showing the...

We investigate the computational complexity of several decision problems in hedonic coalition formation games and demonstrate that attaining stability in such games remains NP-hard even when they are additive. Precisely, we prove that when either core stability or strict core stability is under consideration, the existence problem of a stable coalition structure is NP-hard in the strong sense. ...

Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a fi rst theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. We show that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness to the child, costs of own child birth, and any adoption-specifi c monetary return that is received net of the costs of adopting th...

In a model of evolution driven by con ict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the in uence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions di er in their exclusiveness we nd that these hegemonies will be ine ciently extractive in the sense of having ine ciently high taxes, high compensation for state...