We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a sufficient condition for uniqueness. Comparing different informational settings we find that if play...

Energy costs are included in the rent for many US apartments, giving tenants little incentive to conserve. This apparent market failure has two explanations: the tenants value the utility-included rental contracts more than they value the extra energy they consume, or the landlords value the contracts more than the cost of that extra energy. We use the Residential Energy Consumption Survey and ...

Politico-Economic Causes of Labor Regulation in the United States: Rent Seeking, Alliances, Raising Rivals’ Costs (Even Lowering One’s Own?), and Interjurisdictional Competition This paper offers an eclectic survey of the political economy of labor regulation in the United States at federal and state levels along the dimensions of occupational health and safety, unjust dismissal, right-to-work,...

The exhaustible-resource monopsony problem provides a basis for understanding the dynamic relationship between resource importers and suppliers. We find that the mere presence of a substitute supply creates a time-inconsistency problem for the monopsonist. When the buyer can commit to delaying the arrival of the substitute, he obtains a substantial reduction in resource prices but not enough as...

fractions obtained from partitioning of aerial methanolic extract of euphorbia aellenii with chloroform (e2), ethyl acetate (e3), n-butanol (e4) and water (e5) were investigated in vitro for their phytotoxicity, insecticidal, anti-leishmanial, cytotoxicity, antibacterial and antifungal activities. sample e2 appeared to have significant phytotoxic activity. in the insecticidal screening study on...

Advocates of rent control often argue that rent control aids the mixing of rich and poor, and perhaps of the races as well. Economic theory does not necessarily predict that rent control will reduce segregation. The best case for rent control as an aid to integration is that it creates pockets of low rent (and low quality) apartments in expensive cities. However, by creating an excess of demand...

Employer’s Information and Promotion-Seeking Activities This paper presents a model in which promotion of employees within the internal firm hierarchy is determined by the individuals’ allocation of time between promotion/rent-seeking and productive activity. We consider the effect of an increase in the employer’s knowledge (information) regarding the employees’ productivity levels on the total...

Rent-seeking models have been used to predict and explain a wide variety of political decisions. This paper extends Tullock’s classic rent-seeking model to the case of a risky rent, where the winner of the rent-seeking contest does not receive the rent for sure, but only probabilistically. We derive the equilibrium and comparative static predictions from our extended model and present the resul...

In the presence of spillovers, decentralized provision of local public goods may lead to a higher surplus than centralized provision even though localities have identical preferences. Indeed, free-riding costs associated to decentralization can be lower than the costs of rent-seeking and influence activities under centralization. Actually, centralization yields a higher level of regional surplu...