0000000000037666
AUTHOR
David K. Levine
showing 20 related works from this author
Conflict, Evolution, Hegemony, and the Power of the State
2013
In a model of evolution driven by conflict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the influence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions differ in their “exclusiveness” we find that these hegemonies will be inefficiently “extractive” in the sense of having inefficiently high taxes, high compensation for state officials, and low welfare.
Evolving to the Impatience Trap: The Example of the Farmer-Sheriff Game
2011
The literature on the evolution of impatience, focusing on one-person decision problems, finds that evolutionary forces favor the more patient individuals. This paper shows that in the context of a game, this is not necessarily the case. In particular, it offers a two-population example where evolutionary forces favor impatience in one group while favoring patience in the other. Moreover, not only evolution but also efficiency may prefer impatient individuals. In our example, it is efficient for one population to evolve impatience and for the other to develop patience. Yet, evolutionary forces move the wrong populations.
Intervention and peace*
2018
Abstract Intervention often does not lead to peace, but rather to prolonged conflict. Indeed, we document that it is an important source of prolonged conflicts. We introduce a theoretical model of the balance of power to explain why this should be the case and to analyse how peace can be achieved: either a hot peace between hostile neighbours or the peace of the strong dominating the weak. Non-intervention generally leads to peace after defeat of the weak. Hot peace can be achieved with sufficiently strong outside intervention. The latter is thus optimal if the goal of policy is to prevent the strong from dominating the weak.
Collusion Constrained Equilibrium
2018
First published: 01 February 2018 This is an open access article licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 4.0 (http://econtheory.org) We study collusion within groups in noncooperative games. The primitives are the preferences of the players, their assignment to nonoverlapping groups, and the goals of the groups. Our notion of collusion is that a group coordinates the play of its members among different incentive compatible plans to best achieve its goals. Unfortunately, equilibria that meet this requirement need not exist. We instead introduce the weaker notion of collusion constrained equilibrium. This allows groups to put positive probability on alternatives …
Interventions with Sticky Social Norms: A Critique
2021
Abstract We study the consequences of policy interventions when social norms are endogenous but costly to change. In our environment, a group faces a negative externality that it partially mitigates through incentives in the form of punishments. In this setting, policy interventions can have unexpected consequences. The most striking is that when the cost of bargaining is high, introducing a Pigouvian tax can increase output—yet in doing so increase welfare. An observer who saw that an increase in a Pigouvian tax raised output might wrongly conclude that this harmed welfare and that a larger tax increase would also raise output. This counter-intuitive impact on output is demonstrated theore…
Conflict, Evolution, Hegemony, and the Power of the State
2013
In a model of evolution driven by conflict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the influence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions differ in their “exclusiveness” we find that these hegemonies will be inefficiently “extractive” in the sense of having inefficiently high taxes, high compensation for state officials, and low welfare.
Trade Associations: Why Not Cartels?
2021
First published: 30 September 2020 The relevance of special interests lobbying in modern democracies can hardly be questioned. But if large trade associations can overcome the free riding problem and form effective lobbies, why do they not also threaten market competition by forming equally effective cartels? We argue that the key to understanding the difference lies in supply elasticity. The group discipline which works in the case of lobbying can be effective in sustaining a cartel only if increasing output is sufficiently costly ‐ otherwise the incentive to deviate is too great. The theory helps organizing a number of stylized facts within a common framework. This article has been accept…
Conflict and the Evolution of Societies
2012
The Malthusian theory of evolution disregards a pervasive fact about human societies: they expand through conflict. When this is taken account of the long-run favors not a large population at the level of subsistence, nor yet institutions that maximize welfare or per capita output, but rather institutions that maximize free resources. These free resources are the output available to society after deducting the payments necessary for subsistence and for the incentives needed to induce production, and the other claims to production such as transfer payments and resources absorbed by elites. We develop the evolutionary underpinnings of this model, and examine the implications of free resource …
State power and conflict driven evolution
2021
The goal of this chapter is to examine the implications of the evolution of social organizations due to external competition. There are a variety of models of external competition. Models such as Ely (2002) examine voluntary migration - these models tend to efficient outcomes as people are drawn to locations with high per capita income. Historically, however, institutional success has not been through voluntary immigration into the arms of welcoming richer neighbors. Rather people and institutions have generally spread through invasion and conflict: the Carthaginians did not emigrate to Rome. Large institutional change has often occurred in the aftermath of the disruption caused by warfare …
Survival of the Weakest: Why the West Rules
2022
We study a model of institutions that evolve through conflict. We find that one of three configurations can emerge: an extractive hegemony, a balance of power between extrac-tive societies or a balance of power between inclusive societies -the latter being most conducive to innovation. As extractive societies are assumed to have an advantage in head to head confrontations we refer to this latter possibility as the survival of the weakest. Our contention is that the reason that the West "rules" can be traced back to two events both taking place in China: the invention of the cannon, which made possible the survival of the weakest in Europe; and the arrival of Genghis Khan, which led to the s…
Peer Discipline and Incentives Within Groups
2014
We investigate how a collusive group can sustain non-Nash actions by enforcing internal discipline through costly peer punishment. We give a simple and tractable characterization of schemes that minimize discipline costs while preserving incentive compatibility. We apply the model to a public goods contribution problem. We find that if the per-capita benefit from the public good is low, then regardless of whether peer discipline is feasible or not only small groups will contribute to the good. If the public good benefit is significant but peer discipline is infeasible it remains the case that only small groups contribute. On the other hand, if the public good benefit is significant but peer…
Evolution of impatience: The example of the Farmer-Sheriff game
2015
The literature on the evolution of impatience, focusing on one-person decision problems, often finds that evolutionary forces favor the more patient individuals. This paper shows that in games where equilibrium involves threat of punishment there are forces generating an evolutionary advantage to the impatient. In particular, it offers a two-population example where evolutionary forces favor impatience in one group while favoring patience in the other. Moreover, efficiency may also favor impatient individuals. In our example, it is efficient for one population to evolve impatience and for the other to develop patience. Yet, evolutionary forces move the opposite direction. Fil: Levine, David…
Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t: Two Masters
2018
Available online: 05 June 2018 We study common agency problems in which two principals (groups) make costly commitments to incentives that are conditioned on imperfect signals of the agent's action. Our framework allows for incentives to be either rewards or punishments. For our basic model we obtain a unique equilibrium, which typically involves randomization by both principals. Greater similarity between principals leads to more aggressive competition. The principals weakly prefer punishment to rewards, sometimes strictly. With rewards an agent voluntarily joins both groups with punishment it depends on whether severe punishments are feasible and cheap for the principals. We study whether…
Dynamics in stochastic evolutionary models
2016
We characterize transitions between stochastically stable states and relative ergodic probabilities in the theory of the evolution of conventions. We give an application to the fall of hegemonies in the evolutionary theory of institutions and conflict, and illustrate the theory with the fall of the Qing dynasty and the rise of communism in China.
The whip and the Bible : punishment versus internalization
2021
First published online: 27 August 2021 A variety of experimental and empirical research indicate that prosocial behavior is important for economic success. There are two sources of prosocial behavior: incentives and preferences. The latter, the willingness of individuals to “do their bit” for the group, we refer to as internalization, because we view it as something that a group can influence by appropriate investment. This implies that there is a trade-off between using incentives and internalization to encourage prosocial behavior. By examining this trade-off we shed light on the connection between social norms observed inside the laboratory and those observed outside in the field. For ex…
Failing to Provide Public Goods: Why the Afghan Army Did Not Fight
2022
The theory of public goods is mainly about the difficulty in paying for them. Our question here is this: Why might public goods not be provided, even if funding is available? We use the Afghan Army as our case study. We explore this issue using a simple model of a public good that can be provided through collective action and peer pressure, by modeling the self-organization of a group (the Afghan Army) as a mechanism design problem. We consider two kinds of transfer subsidies from an external entity such as the U.S. government. One is a Pigouvian subsidy that simply pays the salaries, rewarding individuals who provide effort. The second is an output/resource multiplier (the provision of mil…
Size, fungibility, and the strength of lobbying organizations
2017
Available online: 12 January 2017 How can a small special interest group successfully get an inefficient transfer at the expense of a much larger group with many more resources available for lobbying? We consider a simple model of agenda setting where two groups of different size lobby a politician over a transfer from one group to the other, and the group which sets the agenda can choose the size of the proposed transfer. The groups have resources which are used to pay the politician and to overcome the public goods problem within the group. Our key result is that which group prevails in the agenda setting game depends crucially on whether the transfers can also be used to pay the politici…
Conflict and the Evolution of Societies
2012
The Malthusian theory of evolution disregards a pervasive fact about human societies: they expand through conflict. When this is taken account of the long-run favors not a large population at the level of subsistence, nor yet institutions that maximize welfare or per capita output, but rather institutions that maximize free resources. These free resources are the output available to society after deducting the payments necessary for subsistence and for the incentives needed to induce pro- duction, and the other claims to production such as transfer payments and resources absorbed by elites. We develop the evolutionary underpinnings of this model, and examine the implications of free resourc…
Anti-Malthus: Conflict and the Evolution of Societies
2013
The Malthusian theory of evolution disregards a pervasive fact about human societies: they expand through conflict. When this is taken account of the long-run favors not a large population at the level of subsistence, nor yet institutions that maximize welfare or per capita output, but rather institutions that generate large amount of free resources and direct these towards state power. Free resources are the output available to society after deducting the payments necessary for subsistence and for the incentives needed to induce production, and the other claims to production such as transfer payments and resources absorbed by elites. We develop the evolutionary underpinnings of this model,…
Collusion constrained equilibrium
2018
We study collusion within groups in non-cooperative games. The primitives are the preferences of the players, their assignment to non-overlapping groups and the goals of the groups. Our notion of collusion is that a group coordinates the play of its members among different incentive compatible plans to best achieve its goals. Unfortunately, equilibria that meet this requirement need not exist. We instead introduce the weaker notion of collusion constrained equilibrium. This allows groups to put positive probability on alternatives that are suboptimal for the group in certain razor's edge cases where the set of incentive compatible plans changes discontinuously. These collusion constrained e…