- Consulting Editors
- The Oxford Handbook of The Economics of Peace and Conflict
- Economic Perspectives on Peaceand Conflict
- Informational Aspects of Conflict
- Commitment Problems and Shifting Poweras a Cause of Conflict
- Bargaining and Conflict with Incomplete Information
- The Hobbesian Trap
- Religion, Conflict, and Cooperation
- Comparing Polarization Measures
- Inequality, Polarization, and Conflict
- On the Causes of Civil War
- Reflections on Africa’s Wars
- Methods For Measuring Aggregate Costs Of Conflict
- How Many Bucks in a Bang: On the Estimation of the Economic Costs of Conflict
- Estimating the Costs of War: Methodological Issues, with Applications to Iraq and Afghanistan
- Estimating the Human Costs of War: The Sample Survey Approach
- Mental Health In The Aftermath Of Conflict
- Measuring the Economic Costs of Terrorism
- Assessing the Effects of Military Expenditures on Growth
- The Economic Welfare Cost of Conflict: An Empirical Assessment
- Technologies of Conflict
- Endogenous Formation of Alliances in Conflicts
- Conflicts with Multiple Battlefields
- Laboratory Experiments on Conflict
- War, Trade, and Natural Resources: A Historical Perspective
- Trade in the Shadow of Power
- Conflict and Policy in General Equilibrium: Insights from a Standard Trade Model
- The Use of Coercion in Society: Insecure Property Rights, Conflict, and Economic Backwardness
- War and Poverty
- Aggressive Elites and Vulnerable Entrepreneurs: Trust and Cooperation in the Shadow of Conflict
- Globalization and International Conflict: Can Foreign Direct Investment Increase Cooperation Among Nations?
- National Borders, Conflict and Peace
- Political Institutions and War Initiation: The Democratic Peace Hypothesis Revisited
- Why Follow the Leader? Collective Action, Credible Commitment, and Conflict
- Conflict-Inhibiting Norms
Abstract and Keywords
This article reviews the recent experimental literature on conflict. Although the literature is recent and small, it has already examined a great variety of topics—from the effects of anarchy to factors that contribute to peace and conflict. Laboratory experiments provide a good first test of theories and are especially valuable when field experiments are difficult to come by, as in the case of peace and conflict. The third section of the article portrays the tradition of experimental studies on anarchy, based on rent-seeking style models. The fourth section deals with the coordination problem in overthrowing an autocratic ruler. The fifth section is the residual category surveying studies that tackle specific aspects of conflict. The sixth section presents two studies which use experiments in a different way to gauge the effect that real conflict has on human behavior.
Klaus Abbink is a professor of economics at Monash University.
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