What's new

• Here is a presentation of my and Martin's latest experiments on group reciprocity.
• Reputation and Cooperation in Defense has been accepted for publication by JCR.
• Anonymous Rituals has been accepted for publication by JEBO.
• Motivations Behind Intergroup Conflict has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence.
  
• Comment on the Alternative Vote has been published in Parliamentary Affairs.

Publications

• Reputation and Cooperation in Defense

(with Ro'i Zultan.) Accepted for publication in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

• Anonymous Rituals

(With David Reinstein.) Accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

• Motivations behind intergroup conflict: an experimental study of Greek students after the 2008 riots

(with Alexia Katsanidou and Gerhard Riener.) Accepted for publication in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence.

• Explaining Institutional Change: Why Elected Politicians Implement Direct Democracy

Published (with some alterations) as a chapter in Creative Crises of Democracy, eds. de Jong and Gijsenbergh, Brussels: Peter Lang.

• Comment on David Sanders et al., 'Simulating the Effects of the Alternative Vote in the 2010 UK General Election'

Published in Parliamentary Affairs, July 2011.

• Constitutions and Policy Comparisons

Published in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of Theoretical Politics.

• Sophisticated Voting on Competing Ballot Measures: Spatial Theory and Evidence

Published in the April 2010 issue of the British Journal of Political Science.

Working Papers

These papers (possibly in older versions) may also be available to download from SSRN.

• Reciprocity towards Groups (July 2011)

(with Martin Leroch)
People exhibit reciprocity towards groups when they retaliate, not against the person who harmed them, but against another person in that person's group. Group reciprocity may be a key motivation behind intergroup conflict. We investigated group reciprocity in laboratory experiments. After a group identity manipulation, subjects played a Prisoner's Dilemma with others from different groups. Subjects then allocated money between themselves and other participants. In punishment games, subjects whose Prisoner's Dilemma partner had defected punished participants from the partner's group more, compared to a third group. However, in dictator-style games, subjects did not exhibit group reciprocity. We use our experiments to explore the correlates of group reciprocity.
[Screenshots zip file]

• How to Waste a Crisis: Budget Cuts and Public Service Reform (July 2011)

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, governments have proclaimed their intention to find efficiency savings by reforming government bureaucracy. However, this paper identifies a conflict between savings and reform. Governments are uncertain which departments are effective. In normal times, effective departments can be identified by increasing their budget for a trial period. They will then be able to do more than ineffective ones with the extra money. In bad times, however, the government cannot afford to expand the budget. Then, ineffective departments can mimic effective ones simply by reducing their effort. An empirical implication is that less effective departments will be more affected by budget cuts. This prediction is confirmed in a panel of 9965 US libraries. A second implication is that during fiscal crises, politicians will increase control and oversight of the bureaucracy.

• Interstate Competition and Political Stability (May 2010)

Previous political economy theories of globalization have focused on factor mobility's effect on different social groups. But factor mobility also increases competition between state rulers in providing services for their citizens. I ask how this interstate competition affects the process of political change in individual countries. In a simple model, interstate competition substitutes for democracy, by forcing rulers to invest in public goods so as to avoid capital and labor leaving the country. As a result, citizens are less willing to struggle for democracy, and rulers are less willing to oppose it, when interstate competition is strong. Therefore, there is less conflict over the level of democracy. The theory is tested on a post-war panel of countries, using the strength of neighboring countries' capital controls as a proxy for factor mobility. As the theory predicts, states experience fewer changes in their level of democracy when their neighbors are financially open.

Latest changes: New empirics using Chinn-Ito measure of financial openness.

• The Benefit of Anonymity in Public Goods Games (March 2010)

(with David Reinstein)

Previous work has found that in social dilemmas, the selfish always free-ride, while others will cooperate if
they expect their peers to do so as well. Outcomes may thus depend on conditional cooperators’ beliefs about the
number of selfish types. An early round of the game may be played anonymously, so that contributions cannot
be traced back to particular individuals. By protecting low contributors from potential sanctions, this encourages
selfish types to reveal their true preferences in their play. We offer a simple model illustrating when revelation of
types can increase contributions, and when only an anonymous game can separate types. As a proof of concept, we
run a laboratory experiment involving a two-stage public goods game with an exclusion decision between stages.
An anonymous first stage led to significantly higher stage-two cooperation than a revealed first stage, a slower
decline across the 15 repetitions, unusually high final-stage contributions relative to previous work, and greater
profits. Statistical analysis shows that the anonymous first stage reduced uncertainty about types, and this preserved
cooperation and led to greater efficiency. Our results suggest that customs such as anonymous church donations may
play an important role in building social trust.

Work in Progress

(Papers linked here may have gaps, informal comments, et cetera, and may change rather fast. You have been warned!)

Political Economy of Long-term Decisions.

Exit and Voice (with Ben Lockwood and Carlo Perroni).
Signalling in International Treaties (with Hugh Ward).
An Experiment on the Probabilistic Serial Assignment mechanism (with Morimitsu Kurino and Christoph Vanberg).