Three Essays On Conflict And Cooperation

This dissertation has two segments. The first two chapters comprise the first segment and they examine cooperation in a specialized Prisoner’s Dilemma setting. To induce cooperation, I introduce two institutions designed to not alter the strategic nature of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The first institution is labeled “cost sharing” where a player shares a fraction of the cost of cooperating with the other player. While cost sharing will either increase or leave unchanged the net benefits of cooperating, it does not alter the incentive structure of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Relative to a baseline with no cost sharing and controlling for game history, I find that mild forms of cost sharing are relatively ineffective to induce mutual cooperation in a one shot setting. Only at the maximum cost sharing level (equally sharing the cost of cooperating) does mutual cooperation occur above the baseline level. The second institution is endogenous selection via a unanimous voting mechanism where players determine the type of Prisoner’s Dilemma to interact in. Using the previous results as a new baseline and controlling for selection bias concerns, I do not find increases in cooperation when allowing for unanimous voting. This supports the conjecture in the previous literature that the social welfare-enhancing effect of democracy may be dependent on institutions that align personal and collective incentives. The second segment is an examination of intergroup contest behavior under different forms of intergroup inequalities and post-hoc extreme intergroup costly punishment. I find increases in extreme costly punishment when two groups have asymmetric levels of contest resources (relative to a symmetric baseline condition), but only when the differences are imposed by a randomly chosen favored group. Under symmetric contests, individual ability is negatively correlated with the probability of extreme punishment, but is positively correlated when the randomly chosen favored group imposes the resource inequality.

Published in association with the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (a division of the American Psychological Association), this book is inspired by the groundbreaking work of Morton Deutsch, a pioneer in applied social psychology. The contributors--all authorities in their fields and former students or colleagues of Deutsch--include leading thinkers from schools and departments of sociology, psychology, education, and management, with expertise ranging from labor relations to school-based conflict resolution to cooperative education programs and business policy. Each chapter focuses on one of the three areas of Deutsch's work--conflict, cooperation, and justice--with a commentary by Deutsch himself concluding each section. This volume is both a tribute to the work of Deutsch and a cross-disciplinary contribution to theory and practice in conflict, cooperation, and justice--with applications that cut across business, community, political, and other social groups.

This dissertation consists of three chapters on topics relating to conflict, social cooperation and development economics. Several studies have identified the impact of adverse economic shocks on civil conflict using rainfall variation as an instrument for income or growth. The first chapter contributes to this literature by carrying out a micro-level analysis on the relationship between climate and resource variation with armed conflict using a novel dataset on inter-tribal violence manifested through livestock raids in a pastoral-dependent region of East African called the Karamoja. Consistent with previous work, I find that across the region there is a negative relationship between resources and conflict, when resources are measured with forage. However, I also find that both decreases and increases in rainfall are correlated with conflict across the region. This bimodal relationship between precipitation and conflict persists when I analyse raid-location and tribe specific variation in rainfall, while the relationship between forage and raiding is less clear. There is some indication that forage-scarcity motivates tribes to carry out raids and forage-scarce sublocations appear to be more vulnerable to raids and livestock losses, but these results are not robust to all specifications. In the second chapter, I study the effect of Uganda's 2006 disarmament policy in the Karamoja region in East Africa. The disarmament policy greatly reduced the guns of tribes in the Ugandan districts of the region but not in the Kenyan districts. The theoretical impact of the disarmament is ambiguous, however, since guns can be used for deterrence as well as helping aggressors carry out violent crimes, such as livestock raiding. Empirically, I find that the disarmament campaign had the unintended effect of increasing the frequency of raids in Uganda by about 40%, while, consistent with the idea that disarmament reduced the costs of raiding, I find no impact on the monthly death rate. Moreover, the increase in raids in Uganda was driven by an increase in Ugandan initiated raids on other Ugandans, not an increase in Kenyan initiated raids on Ugandans, suggesting that within Uganda the deterrent effect of guns outweighs their impact as a tool of aggression. In the third chapter, written jointly with Johannes Haushofer, we study the impact of stress on social behavior by exogenously stimulating the two biological systems associated with stress: the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) and noradrenergic (NA) system and measuring behavior in interactive tasks in a laboratory experiment. Our preliminary findings suggest that the concurrent stimulation of both systems, through the administration of 60mg of hydrocortisone and 20mg of yohimbine, did not lead to statistically detectable changes to behavior in any of the social tasks. It did, however, manifest in lower opinions of the trustworthiness and fairness of other people, as well as a decrease in the value associated with helping other people, as measured through a visual analog scale survey. Given these initial results, we find preliminary evidence for a relationship between stress and anti-social behavior as revealed through lower beliefs on social standards. JEL Classification: C91, K42, Q56

This wide-ranging review of some of the major issues in development economics focuses on the role of economic and political institutions. Drawing on the latest findings in institutional economics and political economy, Pranab Bardhan, a leader in the field of development economics, offers a relatively nontechnical discussion of current thinking on these issues from the viewpoint of poor countries, synthesizing recent research and reflecting on where we stand today. The institutional framework of an economy defines and constrains the opportunities of individuals, determines the business climate, and shapes the incentives and organizations for collective action on the part of communities; Pranab Bardhan finds the institutional framework to be relatively weak in many poor countries. Institutional failures, weak accountability mechanisms, and missed opportunities for cooperative problem-solving become the themes of the book, with the role of distributive conflicts in the persistence of dysfunctional institutions as a common thread. Special issues taken up include the institutions for securing property rights and resolving coordination failures; the structural basis of power; commitment devices and political accountability; the complex relationship between democracy and poverty (with examples from India, where both have been durable); decentralization and devolution of power; persistence of corruption; ethnic conflicts; and impediments to collective action. Formal models are largely avoided, except in two chapters where Bardhan briefly introduces new models to elucidate currently under-researched areas. Other chapters review existing models, emphasizing the essential ideas rather than the formal details. Thus the book will be valuable not only for economists but also for social scientists and policymakers.

"The dissertation consists of three distinct essays on multilateral military conflict. The first essay asks a simple question: what conditions are favorable for communication among military partners? It uses a formal model to demonstrate that, counter to conventional wisdom, communication is most difficult when the preferences of potential military coalition partners are aligned. It also considers how the audience of diplomatic communication matters, demonstrating that private communication is most effective. The second essay considers issues of commitment, analyzing when states desire neutrality. In contrast to the standard logic of deterrence, the essay shows that states may benefit by undermining their own ability to stage a military intervention. This creates an incentive for primary disputants to entrap allies in conflict before commitment to neutrality can occur. The results outline the limits of the traditional logic of deterrence, as well as call into question existing arguments about wars of entrapment. The third essay develops a general model of multilateral crisis bargaining to establish results that do not depend upon the details of a specific game form. This general framework is leveraged to analyze a large class of game forms in which privately informed allies may band together to fight a shared enemy. The results uncover a connection to monotonicity properties found in models of bilteral conflict. Additionally, the essay highlights the limits of alliance design. When the resolve of allies is imbalanced, it is not possible to design an alliance institution that eliminates the risk of abandonment and entrapment simultaneously."--Pages ix-x.

This thesis is composed of three related essays on international conflict. In the first essay, I examine the link between domestic regime type and two different sources of uncertainty often argued to be prevalent in international conflict: private information about states' preferences over particular outcomes, and suboptimal foreign policy choices by states due to implementation error. I demonstrate that democratic leaders have a greater tendency to make mistakes than non-democratic leaders in international crises. I also find that democracies possess more private information than more authoritarian regimes in a crisis.

Abstract: This dissertation applies game theoretic analysis to topics in social cooperation, conflict, and diversity. Chapter One describes a mechanism of inter-ethnic conflict and cooperation, in which the fear of collective retaliation for inter-ethnic infractions induces mutual monitoring within each ethnic group to deter such infractions. We construct an equilibrium of peer monitoring, in which in-group policing and inter-group conflict coexist. The functional role of inter-group conflict is to motivate in-group policing of inter-group encounters. Our theory is in contrast to Fearon and Laitin's (1996) theory of inter-ethnic cooperation where there is no connection between the two forms of control. Our theory predicts that the success of inter-ethnic cooperation hinges on the quality of in-group policing. As a consequence, a group with lower quality of policing tends to have more frequent and longer disputes with other groups. Chapter Two studies minority representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the context of redistricting, some political scientists have expressed the concern that concentration of minority voters into a few districts in order to promote minority representation induces a partisan "perverse effect" of reducing seats won by Democrats who traditionally represent minority interests. Our theory explains how the perverse effect can occur and demonstrates that racial redistricting generates a trade-off between the number of minority legislators and the number of Democratic legislators. In light of this trade-off, we subsequently explore two alternative approaches for minority representation proposed in recent debates. One is to create "coalition districts," and the other is to maintain "second-order diversity." Chapter Three considers the effect of altruism on cooperation in the context of a repeated Prisoners' Dilemma. Altruism has two conflicting impacts on cooperation. One is to reduce the temptation for defection; the other is to make future sanctions less effective. The total effect of altruism depends on which of these effects dominates. Our model explains empirically observed patterns concerning effects of social connectedness on success of microcredit schemes.

The authors of the three individual essays in this book reflect on the challenges, over the next ten years or so, of managing the international system and of democratic industrialized societies in that system. These essays have helped frame a re-examination within the Trilateral Commission of the underlying rationale and needed directions of its work. Bill Emmott argues that "the future is defined more by disorder and obscurity than by order and clarity, and that policies must be shaped accordingly to be agile and to deal with a range of potential dangers.... [The] Trilateral alliance has a role to play that is, if anything, even more crucial in this disordered future." For the reforms needed in Japan, Koji Watanabe contends, "Japan has to be all the more international, all the more engaged and active in the shaping of the international setting within which domestic reform has to take place." Cooperation among advanced industrial democracies will continue to "form an important pillar" for Japan within "multilayer networks of bilateral, regional and functional cooperation." Comparing the current period to the end of the last century, a time of unwarranted complacency about the international order, Paul Wolfowitz argues that the foreign policy stakes for the United States and the other industrialized democracies remain very large: "If we can sustain Trilateral cooperation, we will have a strong base from which to tackle the specific challenges we face."

This book introduces students to the complex landscape of state-local intergovernmental relations today. Each chapter illustrates conflict and cooperation for policy problems including the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental regulation, marijuana regulation, and government management capacity. The contributors, leading experts in the field, help students enhance their understanding of the importance of state-local relations in the U.S. federal system, argue for better analysis of the consequences of state-local relations for the quality of policy outcomes, and introduce them to public service career opportunities in state and local government.