There can be three types of heterogeneity among players in a rent-seeking contest. First, the efectiveness of agent's efort on the winning probabilities may difer among players. Secondly, players may evaluate the rent or prize of the rent-seeking contest diferently. Thirdly, players may face diferent financial constraints. Without assuming that each player’s production function for loteries is ...

Buchanan and Tullock’s original trade-off model of constitutional design is used to analyze how constitutional design affects post-constitutional rent seeking, and, in turn, how the anticipation of postconstitution rent seeking should lead to modification of constitutional design—specifically with respect to imposing and maintaining effective (composite) supermajority decision rules. JEL classi...

Possibly as a prelude to a mini series of critical review essays, this short paper is intended to revisit and clarify Tullock's contributions to the concept of rent-seeking. Some subsequent contributions are highlighted, so are its implications on social costs and wealth transfers.

We analyze the distributional effects of rent-seeking via financial sector in a model calibrated to US data. Rent-seeking implies misallocation resources that increases wealth inequality among non-rent-seekers and for whole economy. A deterioration institutional quality implying more leads welfare losses non-rent-seekers, especially those with higher earnings initial wealth, because they are mo...

In this paper, we analyze a multiple winner rent-seeking contest where the number of winners is set by a self-interested regulator. The winners receive a license to compete in a market. The structure of competition in the market influences the number of winners through the preferences of the regulator. The model indicates that Cournot competitors can be better off than firms that are able to co...

Two agents want to coordinate their decisions but may also try to extract rents from each other. Decsions are negotiated at the interim stage, when the agents have private information. The agent who owns an asset has the right to make a unilateral decision regarding this asset, so negotiations must satisfy a participation constraint. We compare nonintegration, where each agent owns one asset, w...

The paper deals with rent-seeking behaviour among agents competing for future shares of a common renewable natural resource. Rent-seeking might become profitable when the agents expect that the distribution of the natural resource in future periods will be dependent on the agents’ extraction of the resource in the past, even though high exploitation might reduce the stock that future individual...

The paper deals with rent-seeking behaviour among agents competing for future shares of a common renewable natural resource. Rent-seeking might become profitable when the agents expect that the distribution of the natural resource in future periods will be dependent on the agents’ extraction of the resource in the past, even though high exploitation might reduce the stock that future individual...