 The killing game: A theory of non-democratic successionGeorgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin Research in Economics, 2015, vol. 69, issue 3, 398-411 Abstract: The winner of a battle for a throne can either execute or spare the loser; if the loser is spared, he contends the throne in the next period. Executing the losing contender gives the winner a chance to rule uncontested for a while, but then his life is at risk if he loses to some future contender who might be, in equilibrium, too frightened to spare him. The trade-off is analyzed within a dynamic complete information game, with, potentially, an infinite number of long-term players. In an equilibrium, decisions to execute predecessors depend on the predecessors’ history of executions. With a dynastic rule in place, incentives to kill the predecessor are much higher than in non-hereditary dictatorships. The historical illustration for our analysis contains a discussion of post-World War II politics of execution of deposed leaders and detailed discussion of non-hereditary military dictatorships in Venezuela in 1830–1964, which witnessed dozens of comebacks and no single political execution. Keywords: Non-democracy; Succession; Execution; Reputation; Markov perfect equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reecon:v:69:y:2015:i:3:p:398-411 DOI: 10.1016/j.rie.2015.05.005 Access Statistics for this article Research in Economics is currently edited by Federico Etro More articles in Research in Economics from Elsevier |
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