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The relationship between wealth and power has long been debated. Nevertheless, this relationship has been rarely studied in a strategic game. In this paper, we study wealth effects in a strategic contest game. Two opposing effects arise: wealth reduces the marginal cost of effort but it also reduces the marginal benefit of winning the contest. We consider three types of contests which vary depending on whether rents and efforts are commensurable with wealth. Our theoretical analysis shows that the effects of wealth are strongly “contest-dependent”. It thus does not support general claims that the rich lobby more or that low economic growth and wealth inequality spur conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the problem of why societies develop differently, a question most recently articulated by Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) . We follow North (1990) in defining institutions as the “rules of the game in society.” The question then becomes why do some societies develop functional institutions while others do not? To investigate this question, we develop and examine a specific type of dynamic game (which we call an Institutional Game). Our point is that complementarities among the choices that all societies make as they develop can help to answer this question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]