Research

Abstract. Why and how do authoritarian regimes pursue development strategies that eventually undermine their survival, while democracies under similar conditions exhibit different developmental patterns? I develop a dynamic model where education simultaneously fosters human capital and civic culture, which shapes political behavior asymmetrically across regimes. Under autocracy, growing civic culture increases regime change risk, creating a modernization threat that compels rulers to strategically curb investment as development proceeds, resulting in a hump-shaped development path of rapid growth followed by strategic stagnation. Under democracy, civic culture strengthens electoral accountability, but outcomes are history-dependent: weak initial civic foundations trap societies in low-investment equilibria, while sufficiently strong civic culture triggers virtuous cycles of sustained development. This asymmetry—where civic culture threatens autocratic survival but enables democratic accountability—provides a unified framework explaining divergent modernization paths. The model reconciles why some autocracies achieve impressive early growth yet face self-limiting development, while democracies exhibit varying performance depending on civic foundations, offering new insights into the political economy of long-run development.

Abstract. We study how a principal incentivizes team production using the mere possibility of costly peer monitoring. The principal offers wages and free-rider reporting bonuses, both payable only upon team success, which critically aligns monitoring incentives with productive effort. Without such bonuses, agents facing colleagues' shirking are incentivized to shirk themselves. With large reporting rewards, however, agents prefer to work and monitor shirking peers rather than shirk. Shirking is thus deterred ex ante, and equilibrium involves no actual monitoring. As a result, our mechanism uniquely implements full effort at only the partial implementation cost. That is, unlike previous mechanisms requiring strategic rents to ensure all agents work, such rents are no longer needed. This highlights the preventive role of off-path contractual clauses under limited liability and demonstrates the importance of outcome-contingency in rewarding peer monitoring. Our results remain robust under capacity constraints on monitoring and in sequential production environments.

Abstract. A principal incentivizes a team, when only success or failure of a joint project is observable. The principal wishes that in every equilibrium all agents work rather than shirk. Rather than specifying individual rewards a la Winter (2004), she may subcontract to some agent, promising him a large sum on project success. That agent is empowered to divide the promise among agents as he wishes.  Extensive-Form Rationalizability arguments show how subcontracting can eliminate strategic uncertainty. Simply, there are divisions a subcontractor intending to shirk will not choose. We show subcontracting is cheaper than centralization when all agents are pivotal enough. More generally, our work illustrates the usefulness of structuring organizations to facilitate the flow of strategic information.

Abstract. We study a leader’s choice of advisors, balancing political alignment, informational competence, and diversity of views. The leader can consult one or two advisors: one is politically aligned but less informed or shares potentially redundant information; the other is better informed but more biased. The leader’s optimal strategy can exhibit reversals. If both advisors are initially consulted, increasing the bias of the more biased advisor may cause the leader to exclude the aligned advisor to preserve truthfulness from the informed one. As bias rises further, the leader ultimately replaces the informed advisor if his bias becomes too large. When the leader is uncertain about the bias of the more informed advisor, increasing the chance of alignment can justify consulting both advisors.

Abstract. We study team incentives under complementarities, moral hazard, and adverse selection. Experts privately know whether their assigned components require costly repair. The principal observes only participation, not effort, and seeks to uniquely implement high quality under belief-free rationalizability (Bergemann and Morris, 2017). Standard contracts rewarding only participation fail to elicit private information, leaving the principal exposed to high coordination rents. We show that a “pay-to-quit” contract—which offers a higher success bonus for opting out than for participating—strictly reduces implementation costs. As the contract screens out experts who intend to shirk or whose components need no repair, participation becomes an on-path signal of active effort. Under complementarities, this endogenous information raises each expert’s marginal contribution, significantly lowering the bonuses required for unique implementation. We also show that, paradoxically, environments in which components are more likely to be already satisfactory can be more expensive to implement robustly, because intervention then becomes less informative.