The strategic equivalence of rent-seeking, innovation, and patent-race games

Two-Dimensional Effort in Patent-Race Games and Rent-Seeking Contests: The Case of Telephony

Using the political-economic history of the development of telephony during the 1870s as a backdrop, this paper studies a two-player Tullock contest that includes both research effort (R&D) and legal effort (i.e., rent-seeking effort). The two types of efforts complement each other and positively influence the payoff of the contest. We assume that legal effort affects the prize value, increasin...

The strategic advantage of negatively interdependent preferences in action-monotonic games

Investigating the strategic advantage of negatively interdependent preferences in action monotonic games, we derive equivalent criteria both for general action monotonic games and for the subclass of action monotonic games with spillovers. Examples demonstrate the generality of our findings, in particular that the strategic advantage prevails beyond the classes of superand submodular games. The...

The Size of Rent-seeking Activity in Iran's Foreign Trade Sector: An Application of the DSGE Approach

Rent-seeking in the trade sector is an outcome of restrictions imposed on tariffs and import quotas by a government. In an effort to acquire more privilege in foreign trade, labor allocates a part of its time-effort to rent-seeking activity, while cutting down on production work. Given the importance of rent-seeking activity due to restrictions imposed by the government in the Iranian economy, ...

What Is The Driving Force Behind Industrial Development In Iran? Rent Seeking And Labor Exploitation As The Driving Force Of Industrial Growth

Unbeatable Imitation

We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule “imitate-the-best” can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show that it can only be beaten by much in games that are of the rock-scissors-paper variety. Thus, in many interesting examples, like 2x2 games, Cournot duopoly...