Catherine Hafer's research while affiliated with New York University and other places
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Publications (37)
Is there a strategic mechanism that explains role-contingent differences in conflict behavior? I sketch a theory in which differences in optimal behavior for attackers and defenders arise under initially symmetric conditions through the dynamic accumulation of differences in the distributions of traits in the subpopulations of potential opponents.
We present a model and a laboratory experiment on the informativeness of debate, varying both informational and institutional variables. The informational variable we focus on is a novel factor affecting the extent to which audience members can learn from exposure to unpersuasive arguments. The more easily a listener can learn from an argument she...
INTRODUCTION Regulatory agencies are often accused of offering forbearance to powerful actors within the industries they are charged with overseeing, possibly in violation of their statutory mandates and to the potential detriment of the broader public. The term bureaucratic capture is often employed as a shorthand for this phenomenon. Any attempt...
We present a game-theoretic model of political discourse that explores how strategic incentives to make potentially persuasive arguments vary across different informational contexts. We show that political sophistication of the listeners fundamentally affects the speakers' incentives to make informative arguments, increasing the informed speech for...
We present a game-theoretic model of debate and a laboratory experiment that explore how strategic incentives to make potentially persuasive arguments vary across different informational and institutional contexts. In our model, a key feature of the informational environment is the extent to which members of a debate audience are able to extract in...
Why do states build international courts, submit cases, and enforce court judg-ments? This paper examines the role of an international court in resolving inter-state disputes. The litigation process is costly and the court's final judgment has no direct binding authority, yet states still submit cases in order to lock in fa-vorable bargaining posit...
We analyze the strategic interaction between a firm, an extortionary mafia, and a potentially corrupt government. The model identifies several results. First, government spending is not monotonic in revenues. Second, although the firm wants the government to challenge the mafia (it uses the threat of electoral sanctions to induce the government to...
We propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contributions by examining the behavior of individual corporate executives. If executives expect contributions to yield policies beneficial to company interests, those whose compensation varies directly with corporate earnings should contribute more than those who...
We present a game-theoretic model of the social dynamics of belief-change, in which the (relevant) logically non-omniscient audience becomes convinced that the speakers'messages are "true"because its own prior beliefs logically entail them, rather than - as in cheap-talk models - because the speaker is (endoge- nously) trustworthy. We characterize...
Industries face collective action and commitment problems when attempting to influence Congress. At the same time, an individual firm's political investments can yield reduced bureaucratic scrutiny by indicating that firm's willingness to contest agency decisions. We develop a model in which the desirability of maintaining a political footprint for...
W e develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citiz...
A theory of deliberation must provide a plausible account both of individuals? choices to speak or to listen and of how they reinterpret their own views in the aftermath of deliberation. We describe a game-theoretic laboratory experiment in which subjects with diverse interests and information choose to speak or to listen and, after updating their...
I analyse the emergence of property rights in a model of conflict and production in the absence of institutions of enforcement.
The population of agents evolves dynamically through conflicts for possession of factor goods among pairs of randomly matched
agents. Conflicts are incomplete information wars of attrition with an agent's type consisting o...
We develop a theory of social polarization induced by "deliberation as self-discovery." In such deliberation, intrinsically persuasive arguments activate the "latent" reasons of the corresponding listeners, whose beliefs about the best alternative change only in response to arguments they find persuasive. In equilibrium, agents sort into ideologica...
Mafias play a critical role as alternative providers of contract enforcement and revenue protection in transition economies. However, the mafia can also be used as a tool of extortion, creating a commitment problem between firms: firms are better off if no one hires the mafia, but, because of the possibility of extortion, each firm finds it individ...
Regulatory agencies impose costs and benefits tailored to individual firms through their discretionary enforcement activities. We propose that corporations use political expenditures in part to "flex their muscles" to regulators and convey their willingness to fight an agency's specific determinations in the political arena. Because the signaling f...
Regulatory agencies impose costs and benefits tailored to individual firms through their discretionary enforcement activities. We propose that corporations use political expenditures in part to to regulators and convey their willingness to fight an agency's specific determinations in the political arena. Because the signaling function of political...
We study a politico-economic model of federations with both fed- eral and supplemental regional provision of a local public good with spillover eects. The conjunction of regional dierences in median income levels and externalities of provision induces dierences in pref- erences over federal and regional levels of provision and gives rise to re-dist...
We study a politico-economic model of federations with both federal and supplemental regional provision of a local (impure) public good with spillover effects. Regional differences in average income levels and externalities of provision induce differences in preferences over federal and regional levels of provision. Although the voters' preferences...
I model decentralized contract enforcement and exchange in an environment that captures the key elements of the steady-state equilibrium in Hafer (2001) in which property is ultimately secured through force (rather than through appeals to third-party enforcement), but in which no conflict occurs. I characterize the equilibrium of the exchange game...
This paper analyzes a model of endogenous political authority in which au-thority may be established by force through a standoff. Two players have a mix of common and contrary interests; the resolution of the dispute is required to be self-sustaining, i.e. there is no external enforcement of agreements; and the players are uncertain about each othe...
We propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contri-butions in a sample of S&P 1500 executives. If executives expect contributions to yield payouts in the form of policies beneficial to company interests, those whose compensation varies directly with corporate earnings should contribute more than those whose...
We explore how the presence of an extortionary mafia affects canonical political economy choices: the level of government corruption, voting decisions, and the optimal level of taxation. The mafia engages in a classic protection racket, demanding fees from a firm in exchange for "protection." Should the firm fail to pay, the mafia employs force to...
Delegating authority to bureaucrats raises two principal concerns. The first is how to ensure that the bureaucrats use this authority to serve the best interests of the public. The second is how to prevent the legislature, namely Congress, from using delegation to promote its own interests to the detriment of the public's. This latter phenomenon is...
Abstract will be provided by author.
Industries face collective action and commitment problems when attempting to in∞uence Congress. At the same time, an individual flrm's political investments can yield reduced bu- reaucratic scrutiny by indicating that flrm's willingness to contest agency decisions. We develop a model in which the desirability of maintaining a political footprint fo...
We analyze the informational properties of debates under a wide class of debate rules in games of persuasion with agents who vary with respect to what arguments they find convincing. We show that if debate is allowed before each vote on a sequential binary agenda (that is, if the game has open-debate voting), then the informativeness of debates and...
We analyze the dynamics of individual choices regarding group membership and deliberation in groups. Both experimental and anecdotal evidence points to the presence of the phenomenon of post-deliberative group polarization - a phenomenon whereby deliberation in biased groups leads individuals' post- deliberative positions to move so as to strengthe...
This paper analyzes a model of standoff in the contest for political author- ity. Two players have a mix of common and contrary interests; the resolution of the dispute must be self-sustaining, i.e. there is no external enforcement of agreements; and the players are uncertain about each other's resolve, i.e., about the relative strength of their in...
We develop a model of international institutions to analyze the relationship between the institutional context in which the international community responds to threats from ârogue statesâ and the provocative or harmful actions ultimately taken by that state. In our model, ordinary states differ in their privately known, underlying costs associa...
Citations
... First, while the concept of capture refers to the informal influence of business interests on both politicians and bureaucrats, politicised enforcement focuses on politicians rather than agency-level bureaucrats. Second, as opposed to state/regulatory capture in which officials are motivated mainly by rent-seeking, the motivations driving politicised enforcement are mainly political (Gordon and Hafer 2014). ...
... The channels by which corporate political activities may impact policies can be legion, but generally revolve around rent-seeking behavior targeted at politicians and manifested in formal lobbying (Hadani et al., 2017), direct and indirect pressure on politicians (Naumovska et al. 2020), forming coalitions of like-minded interlocutors (Murray et al., 2016), and/or various forms of financial transfers which may either be legal (Gupta and Swenson, 2003) or illegal (Sitkoff, 2002). Firms may also apply pressure on regulators rather than elected officials, with firms that have high market share and/or dominance in a particular sector "flexing their muscles" to forestall policies which may have negative ramifications for the firm (Gordon and Hafer, 2005). Such an approach may also be proactive rather than reactive, using firm resources to forecast when external stakeholders could act in a manner deleterious for business. ...
... Also, we make no claims as to whether people personally take advantage of the fact that negotiations are conducted transparently. Given the complexity of many policies, including the TTIP and CETA negotiations, there are strong reasons to believe that ordinary people do not use the opportunity to sift through thousands of pages of legal texts (Ripken 2006;Dickson et al. 2015). We simply submit that transparency comes with enormous evocative weight. ...
... Turning to the third requirement, voters must assign politicians less responsibility for delegated policy outcomes than for legislated outcomes. Previous theories of blame-shifting assume that voters interpret delegation as Loftis 7 a sign that politicians might be incongruent (Fox & Jordan, 2011) or assume that voters are largely ignorant of delegated policies (Almendares, 2012;Fiorina, 1982Fiorina, , 1985. In contrast, I argue that the simple act of delegating more responsibility to implementing bureaucrats separates politicians from policy outcomes enough to reduce the amount of blame voters assign them for outcomes. ...
... The consequence is to make it more likely that receivers, as they sort through streams of information, see the arguments that resonate with them and, ultimately, can make sense of their information. Strikingly, difficulties of turning information into knowledge-which, in this account, stem from insufficient cognitive and/or political sophistication-may, in a strategic context, have the effect of increasing citizens' knowledge (Hafer and Landa 2013;. The overall effect is, then, to make well-reasoned democratic governance possible even though we seem to be bad at reasoning at an individual level. ...
Reference: Information, Knowledge, and Deliberation
... Would any of the players find it beneficial to invest in establishing a court with jurisdiction, as opposed to living in a world without a court? One way to examine such an equilibrium selection question is to consider the payoffs of the various players across equilibria to examine which players have the greatest incentives to invest resources in establishing a particular equilibrium (Banks and Calvert, 1992; Calvert, 1995; Hafer, 2007; Morrow, 1994). This yields the following result. ...
... To identify the right alternatives, they, like Watson, need direct evidence, L i . As we show elsewhere (Hafer and Landa, 2005), agents characterized by (1) systematically and exclusively fail the condition of Negative Introspection – they do not know what they do not know. 7 Upon hearing an argument that relies on a 6. ...
... Of course, the insight that obfuscation may emerge is not new: a leader may obfuscate to attract attention (Dewan and Myatt, 2008) or to convince followers of the veracity of their message (Hafer and Landa, 2008). Here, obfuscation arises under a wider range of objectives. ...
... This is in line with the idea that "much political disagreements is over beliefs …, that we may think of as ideology" (Callander 2011, 657). 8 Hafer and Landa (2005;2007) also see ideology and beliefs as closely connected, thinking of a player's ideology as the likelihood of being persuaded by a left-wing argument versus a right-wing one. Beyond the formal theory literature, Converse (1964) and Sartori (1969) also discuss the notion of ideology as political beliefs, and Gerring argues that several scholars see ideology as "virtually undistinguishable from worldview" (1997,96). ...
Reference: Ideology for the Future
... A related interpretation is that firms respond to poor provision of government services by exiting to an "informal" sector, where they avoid paying taxes but forfeit access to state-provided collective goods ( de Soto, 1990;Johnson, Kaufmann and Shleifer, 1998;Frye and Zhuravskaya, 2000;Roland and Verdier, 2003;Bueno de Mesquita and Hafer, 2005). While undoubtedly an important story for certain sectors in various parts of the world, it is important to note that the firms in the BEEPS sample are officially registered firms which operate in the "formal" sector, regardless of the degree to which they hide revenues from tax authorities. ...
