The economics of violence in natural states
研究了自然状态下精英联盟如何通过暴力控制社会，发现要么精英联盟大且税率高，要么精英弱而军阀掠夺多，且高产出弹性会助长军阀割据，只有小精英联盟能控制生产时才有较高产出和福利。
Violence is key to understanding human interaction and societal development. The natural state of societal organization is that a subset of the population, capable of mustering organized large-scale violence, forms an elite coalition that restrains both violence and coercive appropriation. We highlight key mechanisms underlying such natural states. Our results show that natural states either have a large elite coalition and a high tax rate, or a weak elite and a high level of appropriation by a large group of violence specialists outside the elite, termed warlords. When output elasticity of effort is high, it induces elite members to limit their tax rate, which in turn promotes warlordism. Only when the elite coalition is small but still able to control a sizeable share of production, as a result of its cooperative quality and a low decisiveness of conflict between elite and warlords, do we find comparatively high levels of production and producer welfare. Our results imply that almost all natural states experience continuous coercion exercised by elite members and violence between elite coalitions and warlords. We show that this is not a temporary out-of-equilibrium-situation but a permanent phenomenon, as can most conspicuously be observed in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Our model thus illustrates the rigidity of natural states.