A model of political enterprise.

Political organizations engaged in long-term operations are viewed as firms that sell promises: their output is the expectation of a reorganization of society. Because benefits will accrue to the organization's customers and rewards will be paid out to its workers only if and when the goal is achieved, the workers are volunteers in the sense that they engage in unpaid effort today in exchange for a probabilistic reward tomorrow. Because a market for promises is the ideal ground for reciprocal cheating, some mechanisms to ensure reciprocal trust must be devised if exchange is to take place at all. Three problems of reciprocal trust are discussed: the firm's credibility vis-a' -vis its workers, workers' shirking, and the firm's credibility vis-a' -vis its customers. It is shown that a viable solution to these problems in effect turns the political firm into a kind of producer cooperative. It is then shown that the intrinsic inefficiency of a market made up of producer cooperatives makes merger likely, until a single firm remains. Then it is argued that these trust problems are further lessened if the firm undertakes commercial production on the side, with important consequences for its behavior: this is analyzed with a formal model of a two-product cooperative. These features of the political enterprise and industry are finally shown to account for a variety of observed facts of political life.

The cult of martyrs

This paper suggests a rational explanation for extreme voluntary sacrifice in situations in which the state of the world when the decision must be made is observable only by the agent. Such explanation is the cult of martyrs, heroes, and saints. This cult may get out of control and fuel fanaticism, or excessive sacrifice from the standpoint of the sponsoring organization. A survey of the historical evidence of Christian martyrdom strongly suggests that martyrs were driven by the expectation of a cult in this world, not by otherworldly rewards. In particular, it is argued that the evidence of excess martyrdom in both Muslim Spain and the Roman Empire strongly speaks for the cult theory.martyrdom, cult, afterlife, economics of religion, principal-agent model, suicide terrorism

Radicalization as a reaction to failure: an economic model of islamic extremism

This paper views Islamist radicals as self-interested political revolutionaries and builds on a general model of political extremism developed in a previous paper (Ferrero, 2002), where extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then turns negative, and whose level is optimally chosen by a revolutionary or-ganization. The organization is bound by a free-access constraint and hence uses the degree of extremism as a means of indirectly controlling its level of membership with the aim of maximizing expected per capita income of its members, like a producer co-operative. The gist of the argument is that radicalization may be an optimal reaction to perceived failure (a widespread perception in the Muslim world) when political activists are, at the margin, relatively strongly averse to effort but not so averse to extremism, a configuration that is at odds with secular, Western-style revolutionary politics but seems to capture well the essence of Islamic revolutionary politics, embedded as it is in a doctrinal framework.

Accidental socialism: a natural experiment in Haiti 1796–1820

AbstractFor some 25 years in revolutionary Haiti, most of the productive land was nationalized and run as state property. This paper shows that this economic system can be accurately described as agrarian socialism. Its life and death are compared with the experiences of 20th-century socialist regimes and their transition to a market economy, paying special attention to the kindred case of São Tomé. Haitian socialism is interesting because it was the unintended, accidental product of an emergency situation: the killing or flight of all the French landlords, which made their land vacant property and drove the state to run it in the public interest to defend the revolution. Therefore, it can be read as a natural experiment in socialism in the absence of a socialist ideology and of a socialist party that could hold the system together, constrain its income distribution, and control its eventual privatization

Killing for the Sake of Infamy: The Herostratos Syndrome and What to Do about it

The Herostratos syndrome affects some people who perpetrate odious attacks for the sake of infamy. We suggest that this sheds some useful light to explain the wave of mass killing going on in Europe and North America, including school shootings and Jihadist terrorism, within a game-theoretic framework. The analysis points out that policies aimed at countering this type of violence should focus on trivializing these attacks and reducing the publicity that they get in the media

RELACIÓN ENTRE EL RENDIMIENTO ACADÉMICO DE LOS INGRESANTES Y EL ABANDONO DE LOS ESTUDIOS UNIVERSITARIOS: COMPARACIÓN ENTRE CARRERAS DE INGENIERÍA Y ECONOMICAS

La preocupación por orientar adecuadamente los recursos que se afectan a los programas de apoyo a los estudiantes de primer año de las carreras, nos llevó a trabajar intentando generar un modelo que sea capaz de determinar, anticipadamente, que estudiantes se encontrarían en situación de abandonar sus estudios. En una primera aplicación del modelo, se analizó la correlación entre el rendimiento académico y el abandono para diez cohortes de ingresantes, de las dos carreras de Ingeniería que ofrece la Universidad Nacional de Luján, observándose una significativa correlación entre el rendimiento académico del estudiante en el primer cuatrimestre y el abandono de los estudios durante el segundo, tercero y cuarto cuatrimestre. En este trabajo, presentamos los resultados que se alcanzaron al aplicar el mismo modelo a las diez cohortes, equivalentes, de estudiantes de las dos carreras del campo de las Ciencias Económicas que se ofrecen en la misma Institución: Licenciatura en Administración y Licenciatura en Comercio Internacional. Las principales conclusiones a las que arribamos es que el modelo se valida positivamente al cambiar el origen disciplinar de las carreras en las que se aplica. Por otra parte, existe mayor correlación entre el rendimiento académico en el primer cuatrimestre y el momento en que se abandonan los estudios para los estudiantes de carreras de Ciencias Económicas que la observada en los de Ingeniería. Se repite el fenómeno observado para las carreras de Ingeniería, de disminuir la correlación entre el rendimiento académico y el abandono para la cohorte 2002. También se detecta una diferencia significativa respecto de la moda para la cantidad de asignaturas aprobadas durante el primer cuatrimestre para las cuatro carreras

RELACIÓN ENTRE EL RENDIMIENTO ACADÉMICO DE LOS INGRESANTES EN CARRERAS DE INGENIERÍA Y EL ABANDONO DE LOS ESTUDIOS UNIVERSITARIOS

La preocupación por orientar adecuadamente los escasos recursos que pueden afectarse a los programas de apoyo a los estudiantes de primer año de las carreras, nos ha llevado a trabajar intentando generar un modelo que sea capaz de determinar la probabilidad de que un estudiante deje sus estudios en función de su rendimiento académico durante el primer cuatrimestre de la carrera. Trabajamos con diez cohortes de ingresantes de las dos carreras de ingeniería que se dictan en la Universidad Nacional de Luján buscando verificar si existe una correlación significativa entre el rendimiento académico del estudiante en ese primer cuatrimestre y la deserción durante el segundo, tercero y cuarto cuatrimestre. Las principales conclusiones a las que arribamos es que existe una importante correlación entre el rendimiento académico en el primer cuatrimestre y la deserción que se produce durante los momentos ya señalados. Esto llevaría a poder detectar rápidamente a los estudiantes que necesitan de algún programa de apoyo o tutoría pues se identifican como aquellos con una mayor probabilidad de abandonar los estudios. El haber trabajado con diez cohortes nos permitió también probar si el modelo arroja valores de correlación equivalentes ante distintas situaciones políticas, económicas y sociales. En este sentido, se puede observar como se produce una baja en la correlación al atravesar la crisis del 2001