Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/227890 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2019-24
Publisher: 
University of Massachusetts, Department of Economics, Amherst, MA
Abstract: 
This paper studies pillage games (Jordan in J Econ Theory 131.1:26-44, 2006, "Pillage and property"), which are well suited to modelling unstructured power contests. To enable empirical test of pillage games' predictions, it relaxes a symmetry assumption that agents' intrinsic contributions to a coalition's power is identical. In the three-agent game studied: (i) only eight configurations are possible for the core, which contains at most six allocations; (ii) for each core configuration, the stable set is either unique or fails to exist; (iii) the linear power function creates a tension between a stable set's existence and the interiority of its allocations, so that only special cases contain strictly interior allocations. Our analysis suggests that non-linear power functions may offer better empirical tests of pillage game theory.
Subjects: 
power contests
core
stable sets
JEL: 
C71
D51
P14
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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