Repression by collective responsibility (JMP)

I formalize a key trade-off in collective punishment: while punishing people for others' actions weakens the direct deterrent effect of the sanction, it motivates them to police one another.

Collective punishment under aggregate monitoring

When rulers observe only how many people obey, the optimal punishment rule is bang-bang: punish if and only if the count falls below a threshold. This threshold must coincide with a mode of the obedience distribution it induces.

Electoral manipulation and incentives

I ask under what conditions the ability to manipulate elections increases incumbents' effort. I show that if effort and manipulation are publicly observed, manipulation can induce more effort and thus yield genuinely more popular incumbents.