We construct a game theoretic model of an oligarchic economy that potentially could be targeted by smart international sanctions. Oligarchs in this economy provide support for their leader, a strong man and potentially an autocrat, in return for favors that results in having income higher than the average income in the country. We derive the conditions under which smart sanctions lead to compli...

This paper reports the results from a real-effort team production experiment, where best performers can impose either tacit or explicit sanctions on their less-performing partners. The behavior of the best performer in the team differs from one condition to another. When explicit sanctions are not allowed, good performers reduce their effort in response to the advantageous difference in scores;...

A growing body of literature suggests that political factors are one of the major causes of environmental damage in developing countries endowed with a relative abundance of renewable resources. This has prompted calls for the use of trade sanctions to encourage sustainable resource management practices in these countries. This paper develops a model to assess the interaction between political ...

Adolescent Drug Use and the Deterrent Effect of School-Imposed Penalties Simple OLS estimates of the effect of school-imposed penalties for drug use on a student’s consumption of marijuana are biased if both are determined by unobservable school or individual attributes. The potential reverse causality is also a challenge to retrieving estimates of the causal relationship, as the severity of sc...

Multi-agent systems Computational Trust Normative Control Betrayal Despite relevant insights from socio-economics, little research in multi-agent systems has addressed the interconnections between trust and normative notions such as contracts and sanctions. Focusing our attention on scenarios of betrayal, in this paper we combine the use of trust and sanctions in a negotiation process. We desc...

For over a decade, agent research has shown that social commitments support the definition of open multiagent systems by capturing the responsibilities that agents contract toward one another through their communications. These systems, however, rely on the assumption that agents respect the social commitments they adopt. To overcome this limitation, in this paper we investigate the role of san...

Third-party punishment has recently received attention as an explanation for human altruism. Feelings of anger in response to norm violations are assumed to motivate third-party sanctions, yet there is only sparse and indirect support for this idea. We investigated the impact of both anger and guilt feelings on third-party sanctions. In two studies both emotions were independently manipulated. ...

In this article we incorporate notions of the fairness of sanctions into the standard model of public enforcement. When both the probability and magnitude of sanctions may be varied, the usual solution involves a very high sanction and a relatively low probability of enforcement if individuals are risk neutral. When the issue of fairness is added to the analysis, the optimal sanction generally ...

The use of social sanctions against behaviour which contradicts a set of informal rules is often an important element in the functioning of informal institutions in traditional societies. In the social sciences, sanctioning behaviour has often been explained in terms of the internalisation of norms that prescribe the sanctions (e.g. Parsons 1951) or the threat of new sanctions against those who...