English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

The prince – or better no prince? The strategic value of appointing a successor

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons51208

Konrad,  Kai A.
Public Economics, MPI for Tax Law and Public Finance, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Konrad, K. A., & Mui, V.-L. (2017). The prince – or better no prince? The strategic value of appointing a successor. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61(10), 2158-2182. doi:10.1177/0022002716631103.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0029-B2EC-5
Abstract
Appointing a successor (the “prince”) allows the ruler (the “king”) to alter the structures of conflicts that take place between him and his potential challengers, as well as the structures of conflicts that take place among his potential challengers. Motivated by historical examples and using an infinite horizon rulership competition game, we show that while an appointed prince constitutes a powerful and dangerous threat to the incumbent ruler (the elevated threat effect), the appointed prince can also offer the incumbent ruler increased protection against other potential challengers ( the barrier effect). We determine conditions when the overall effect of appoint ing a successor benefits the incumbent ruler and enables him to acquire a larger share of the governance rent in equilibrium.