Date & Time: Munich (6 pm), Bath (5 pm), Cincinnati (12 pm), Los Angeles (9 am), Singapore (August 12, 12 am), Beijing (August 12, 12 am), Sydney (August 12, 2 am)

Kris De Jaegher will present his paper titled "Threat of sabotage as a driver of collective action".

Abstract of the paper:
A theoretical model is presented where the welfare of contributors to a public good can increase when they face an adversary who ex post sabotages their efforts. The reason for this result is that it is a best response for the adversary to maximally sabotage the smallest effort, thus increasing a defector’s marginal product of effort. The result applies for a sufficiently large degree of complementarity between the contributors’ efforts, and extends when contributors are heterogeneous. Moreover, for intermediate degrees of complementarity the result also extends when contributors coordinate on the risk-dominant instead of the payoff-dominant equilibrium, when the adversary does not observe individual efforts, and when the adversary is a natural threat that randomly lets individual efforts fail.

Chair: Kai A. Konrad, Co-Chair: Subhasish Chowdhury