UC San Diego

This dissertation is a collection of three essays on political economy. In the first chapter, I develop an economic theory of how a society's distribution of power and resources evolves over time. Multiple lineages of players compete by accumulating power, which is modeled as an asset that increases the probability of winning conflicts over resources. Given any initial distribution of power, this model provides a unique equilibrium prediction of how it will evolve over time. Three types of stable distributions are approached in the long run: inclusive, oligarchic, and dictatorial, where power is uniformly distributed among all players, a few players, or held by just one player, respectively. I show that power and resources inevitably fall into the hands of a few when political competition is left unchecked in large societies. This addresses a longstanding empirical puzzle, and I also provide policy implications for keeping inclusivity stable in large societies.

In the second chapter, my co-author, Danil Dmitriev, and I consider the problem of designing a voting mechanism that is robust to derailment by external groups. We show that plurality voting and other standard mechanisms are often not robust to sabotage; in fact, it is sometimes preferable to not run any poll at all. The optimal voting mechanism is found to make saboteurs indifferent between each alternative they can vote for since this undermines their ability to adversely affect the designer's predictions of other voters' preferences.

In the third chapter, I study how a sender can use verifiable binary evidence to influence a receiver about a binary state when the relevance of information is ex ante uncertain and asymmetrically known by the sender. The sender has access to two pieces of evidence: one they know to be perfectly informative of the state and one that is completely uninformative. I show that while full disclosure of evidence is possible in equilibrium, the receiver can never fully unravel which piece of evidence is relevant. Consequently, the receiver may gain little to no information about the state even when all evidence is truthfully disclosed.