Knowledge that Transforms

We build a game-theoretic model where aggression can be triggered by domestic political concerns as well as the fear of being attacked. In the model, leaders of full and limited democracies risk losing power if they do not stand up to threats from abroad. In addition, the leader of a fully democratic country loses the support of the median voter if he attacks a non-hostile country. The result is a non-monotonic relationship between democracy and peace. Using Polity data, we classify countries as full democracies, limited democracies, and dictatorships. For the period 1816–2000, Correlates of War data suggest that limited democracies are more aggressive than other regime types, including dictatorships, and not only during periods when the political regime is changing. In particular, a dyad of limited democracies is more likely to be involved in a militarized dispute than any other dyad (including “mixed” dyads, where the two countries have different regime types). Thus, while full democratization might advance the cause of peace, limited democratization might advance the cause of war. We also find that as the environment becomes more hostile, fully democratic countries become more aggressive faster than other regime types.

Informational asymmetries between a firm and investors may lead to adverse selection in capital markets. This paper demonstrates that when the market obtains noisy information about a firm over time, this adverse selection problem can be costlessly solved by issuing callable convertible bonds with restrictive call provisions. Such securities can be designed to make the payoff to new claimholders independent of the private information of the manager. This eliminates the possibility of any dilution of equity or underinvestment and implements the symmetric information outcome in either a pooling or a separating equilibrium. The same first-best efficient outcome can also be implemented by issuing floating-price and mandatory convertibles.

I consider a dynamic model of competition between two proprietary networks. Consumers die and are replaced with a constant hazard rate, and firms compete for new consumers to join their network by offering network entry prices. I derive a series of results pertaining to (a) existence and uniqueness of symmetric equilibria, (b) monotonicity of the pricing function ( e.g. larger networks set higher prices), (c) network size dynamics (increasing dominance vs. reversion to the mean), and (d) firm value (how it varies with network effects). Finally, I apply my general framework to the study of termination charges in wireless telecommunications. I consider various forms of regulation and examine their impact on firm profits and market share dynamics.

The “new classical” theory states that families in low-skill occupations with low levels of human capital can stay poor from one generation to the next, while families in high-skill occupations with correspondingly high levels of human capital stay wealthy, despite being endowed with the same level of ability on average. This paper proposes an informal institutional mechanism—the community-based network—through which families belonging to the same neighbourhood or kinship group can bootstrap their way out of such low-skill occupational traps. The insight from the dynamic model that is developed is that once they form, new networks providing mutual support to their members and substituting for inherited parental human capital and wealth will strengthen most rapidly in historically disadvantaged communities, generating a correspondingly high level of intergenerational mobility. These predictions are successfully tested using unique data from India. The analysis in this paper, coupled with an emerging empirical literature on networks and migration, provides a new perspective on mobility in developing countries, with restrictive traditional networks decaying even as new networks supporting collective mobility form and strengthen over time.

We propose a computationally feasible way of deriving the identified features of models with multiple equilibria in pure or mixed strategies. It is shown that in the case of Shapley regular normal form games, the identified set is characterized by the inclusion of the true data distribution within the core of a Choquet capacity, which is interpreted as the generalized likelihood of the model. In turn, this inclusion is characterized by a finite set of inequalities and efficient and easily implementable combinatorial methods are described to check them. In all normal form games, the identified set is characterized in terms of the value of a submodular or convex optimization program. Efficient algorithms are then given and compared to check inclusion of a parameter in this identified set. The latter are illustrated with family bargaining games and oligopoly entry games.

This paper investigates the relationship between media bias and the influence of the media on voting in the context of newspaper endorsements. We first develop a simple econometric model in which voters choose candidates under uncertainty and rely on endorsements from better informed sources. Newspapers are potentially biased in favour of one of the candidates and voters thus rationally account for the credibility of any endorsements. Our primary empirical finding is that endorsements are influential in the sense that voters are more likely to support the recommended candidate after publication of the endorsement. The degree of this influence, however, depends upon the credibility of the endorsement. In this way, endorsements for the Democratic candidate from left-leaning newspapers are less influential than are endorsements from neutral or right-leaning newspapers and likewise for endorsements for the Republican. We also find that endorsements are more influential among moderate voters and those more likely to be exposed to the endorsement. In sum, these findings suggest that voters do rely on the media for information during campaigns but that the extent of this reliance depends upon the degree and direction of any bias.

We study a model where the aggregate trading of currency speculators reveals new information to the central bank and affects its policy decision. We show that the learning process gives rise to coordination motives among speculators leading to large currency attacks and introducing non-fundamental volatility into exchange rates and policy decisions. We show that the central bank can improve the ex ante effectiveness of its policy by committing to put a lower weight ex post on the information from the market, and that transparency may either increase or decrease the effectiveness of learning from the market, depending on how it is implemented.

We develop a dynamic repeated election model in which citizen candidates are distinguished by both their ideology and valence. Voters observe an incumbent's valence and policy choices but only know the challenger's party. Our model provides a rich set of novel results. In contrast to existing predictions from static models, we prove that dynamic considerations make higher-valence incumbents more likely to compromise and win re-election, even though they compromise to more extreme policies. Consequently, we find that the correlation between valence and extremist policies rises with office-holder seniority. This result may help explain previous empirical findings. Despite this result, we establish that the whole electorate gains from improvements in the distribution of valences. In contrast, fixing average valence, the greater dispersion in valence associated with a high-valence political elite always benefits the median voter but can harm a majority of voters when voters are sufficiently risk averse. We then consider interest groups (IGs) or activists who search for candidates with better skills. We derive a complete theoretical explanation for the intuitive conjectures that policies are more extreme when IGs and activists have more extreme ideologies, and that such extremism reduces the welfare of all voters.

The incentive and project selection effects of agent anonymity are investigated in a setting where an evaluator observes a subjective signal of project quality. Although the evaluator cannot commit ex ante to an acceptance criterion, she decides up front between informed review , where the agent's ability is directly observable, or blind review , where it is not. An ideal acceptance criterion balances the goals of incentive provision and project selection. Relative to this, informed review results in an excessively steep equilibrium acceptance policy: the standard applied to low-ability agents is too stringent and the standard applied to high-ability agents is too lenient. Blind review, in which all types face the same standard, often provides better incentives, but it ignores valuable information for selecting projects. The evaluator prefers a policy of blind (respectively informed) review when the ability distribution puts more weight on high (respectively low) types, the agent's pay-off from acceptance is high (respectively low), or the quality signal is precise (respectively imprecise). Applications discussed include the admissibility of character evidence in criminal trials and academic refereeing.

While there is an extensive literature on how economic agents bargain to divide an asset, little is known about the decision to initiate bargaining and how the initiation affects the outcome of bargaining. We address these questions in the context of high-stakes poker tournaments in which the last few players often negotiate the division of the remaining prize money rather than risk playing the tournament to the end. In 63% of the tournaments in our sample players enter into negotiations, and in 31%, they successfully reach an agreement. We find that the identity of the player who initiates bargaining affects whether a deal is completed but does not affect the terms of the eventual deal. The initiator tends to have a weaker than average position at the table, but the likelihood that a deal will be completed increases in the initiator's strength in the game and history of winning past tournaments. These findings indicate that initiating negotiations conveys information that is relevant to whether a deal will emerge. Nevertheless, initiating bargaining does not affect the initiator's pay-off in a completed deal. Lastly, we find strong evidence that bargaining tends to be initiated and is more likely to be successful when participants' stakes are about equal, consistent with the theoretical work of Cramton, Gibbons and Klemperer (1987, “Dissolving a Partnership Efficiently”, Econometrica, 55, 615–632).