The effect of within-group inequality in a conflict against a unitary threat
-
Maria Cubel
and
Santiago Sanchez-Pages
Abstract
A group of agents must defend their individual income from an external threat by pooling their efforts against it. The winner of this confrontation is determined by a contest success function where members’ efforts display a varying degree of complementarity. Individual effort is costly and its cost follows a convex isoelastic function. We investigate how the success of the group in the conflict and its members’ utilities vary with the degree of within-group inequality. We show that there is a natural relationship between the group’s probability of victory and the Atkinson index of inequality. If members’ efforts are complementary or the cost function convex enough, more egalitarianism within the group increases the likelihood of victory against the external threat. The opposite holds when members’ efforts are substitutes and the cost linear enough.
© 2012 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Peace Economics Peace Science and Public Policy
- Political Economy of Institutions and Conflict
- The Consequences of Divide-and-Rule Politics in Africa South of the Sahara
- Citizenry Accountability in Autocracies
- Military Spending and Democratisation
- A Test of Huntington’s Thesis
- Partitioning Ethnic Groups and their Members: Explaining Variations in Satisfaction with Democracy in Africa
- Conflict and Violence
- The Organization of Political Violence by Insurgencies
- The lone wolf terrorist: sprees of violence
- Rooted in Urban Poverty? Failed Modernization and Terrorism
- Human Rights “Naming & Shaming” and Civil War Violence
- Conflict Dynamics
- A Note on a Comparison of Simultaneous and Sequential Colonel Blotto Games
- The effect of within-group inequality in a conflict against a unitary threat
- Cooperation beats Deterrence in Cyberwar
- Civil Conflict in Africa
- The Socioeconomic Distribution of Adult Mortality during Conflicts in Africa
- Wartime Violence and Post-Conflict Political Mobilization in Mozambique
- Gold and Civil Conflict Intensity: evidence from a spatially disaggregated analysis
