Economics Department Working Paper Series
Working Paper Number
2019-24
Publication Date
2019
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.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/15848119
License
UMass Amherst Open Access Policy
Recommended Citation
Kerber, Manfred; Rowat, Colin; and Yoshihara, Naoki, "Asymmetric majority pillage games" (2019). UMass Amherst Economics Working Papers. 281.
https://doi.org/10.7275/15848119