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Full-Text Articles in Economics

The Costs Of Conflict, Adam Smith Jan 2014

The Costs Of Conflict, Adam Smith

Economics Department Faculty Publications & Research

Violent conflict destroys resources. It generates "destruction costs." These costs have an important effect on individuals’ decisions to cooperate or conflict. We develop two models of conflict: one in which conflict’s destruction costs are independent of individuals’ investments in "arms"—the tools of conflict—and another in which conflict’s destruction costs depend on those investments. Our models demonstrate that when conflict’s destruction costs are arms-dependent, conflict is more costly, making cooperation more likely. We test this prediction with a laboratory experiment in which subjects first choose how heavily to invest in arms and then choose whether to cooperate or conflict in an …


Violence, Access, And Competition In The Market For Protection, Adam Smith Jan 2013

Violence, Access, And Competition In The Market For Protection, Adam Smith

Economics Department Faculty Publications & Research

We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the performance of a market for protection. As the central feature of our treatment comparisons, we vary the access that “peasants” have to violence-empowered “elites”. The focus of the experiment is to observe how elites price and operate their protective services to peasants, and to observe the degree to which elites engage in wealth-destroying violence in competition amongst each other for wealth generating peasants. We find that greater access to peasants strikingly increases violence among the elites, but with limited access the elites markedly extract more tribute from the peasants. Our findings are …


A Theory Of Entangled Political Economy, With Application To Tarp And Nra, Adam Smith Jan 2011

A Theory Of Entangled Political Economy, With Application To Tarp And Nra, Adam Smith

Economics Department Faculty Publications & Research

The recent financial crisis has provoked a raft of contending claims as to whether the cause of the crisis is better attributed to market failure or political failure. Such claims are predicated on a presumption that markets and polities are meaningfully separate entities. To the contrary, we argue that contemporary arrangements create an entangled political economy that renders theorizing based on separation often misleading. Within this alternative framework of entangled political economy, we illuminate both the recent Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration (NRA).


Monetary Policy Essay, Dan Brocklehurst Jun 2010

Monetary Policy Essay, Dan Brocklehurst

Academic Symposium of Undergraduate Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Anarchy, Groups, And Conflict: An Experiment On The Emergence Of Protective Associations, Adam Smith Jan 2009

Anarchy, Groups, And Conflict: An Experiment On The Emergence Of Protective Associations, Adam Smith

Economics Department Faculty Publications & Research

In this paper, we investigate the implications of the philosophical considerations presented in Nozick‘s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by examining group formation in a laboratory setting where subjects engage in both cooperative and conflictual interactions. We endow participants with a commodity used to generate earnings, plunder others, or protect against plunder. In our primary treatment, we allow participants to form groups to pool their resources. We conduct a baseline comparison treatment that does not allow group formation. We find that allowing subjects to organize themselves into groups does not lead to more cooperation and may in fact exacerbate tendencies towards …