University admission requirements as rent-seeking

The paper argues that admission requirements into public universities are best viewed as rent-seeking by several groups, in contrast to the conventional rationing rationale. The rents are principally nonfinancial for some of the groups. The paper concludes by showing why admission requirements are not set too high.Discussions with Joe Jadlow, Scott Turner and Larkin Warner, and comments by colleagues on an earlier version in our departmental Workshop helped clarify the issues. I thank them, emphasizing that the normal caveat is not pro forma.     

Legal expenditure as a rent-seeking game

Legal expenditures at a civil trial constitute an interesting type of rent-seeking contest. In civil litigation there is a natural interaction between the objective merits of the case and the outcome of the contest. Institutions such as fee shifting do not generally have a counterpart in other rent-seeking contests. The endogenous decision to participate in the rent-seeking contest corresponds to the decision by the plaintiff to bring a case, and the decision by the defendant to defend it. The desirability of fee shifting is very sensitive to the value of the parameter which describes the legal technology.     

Measuring rent-seeking

Public Choice - Some 30 years ago Gordon Tullock, in his capacity as Editor of Public Choice, made a pointed effort to motivate researchers to measure and quantify resource investments in...     

Cooperative rent-seeking

The paper introduces a concept of “efficiency set” in the context of group decisions and analyses its properties. If the set contains a single element, then the Borda rule finds it. Otherwise, the group needs a value function to choose from the efficient alternatives. Two value functions, with considerations for the number of participants who are badly affected by the choice, have been discussed. It turns out that the consistency axiom of group choice imposes a constraint, on the form of the value function, with questionable normative significance.     

Stackelberg rent-seeking

In this paper I present a formal analysis of rent-seeking games in which the players do not move simultaneously. I consider rent-seeking situations where the players are risk neutral and may value the prize differently. The subgame perfect equilibrium outcome in this Stackelberg game provides several surprising and interesting results. I extend the problem to deal with cases of incomplete information concerning the value a player has for the politically contestable rent.     

Influencing rent-seeking contests

This paper shows that a policy that uniformly increases contestants’ effort costs can lead to an increase in total effort. In asymmetric settings, this “levels the playing field” and therefore encourages weaker players (who otherwise would have stayed out) to enter. Paradoxically, a contest designer whose only objective is to maximize total effort may thus wish to make rent-seeking “more difficult.” These results suggest that the often-lamented bureaucratic red tape might in fact be a rational response to the problem of attracting lobbyists to participate in a contest.     

Famine,genocide, and refugees

He has written widely on the subjects of genocide, famine, and refugees. He is co-author (with Frank Chalk) of The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies.     

Crowding-out in productive and redistributive rent-seeking

This paper presents a general rent-seeking model in which participants decide on entry before choosing their levels of efforts. The conventional wisdom in the rent-seeking literature suggests that the rent dissipation increases with the number of potential participants and with their productivity of effort. In this paper, we show that this result of the rent-seeking literature is far from general and applies only when participants are relatively weak and enter the game with certainty. In the presence of strong competitors, the expected total dissipation actually decreases, since participation in the game is less frequent. We further consider the impact of competitors’ exit option, distinguishing between “redistributive rent-seeking” and “productive rent-seeking” situations. In redistributive rent-seeking, no social loss results from the fact that all competitors exit the race. In productive rent-seeking, instead, lack of participation creates a social loss (the “lost treasure” effect), since valuable rents are left unexploited. We show that the lost-treasure effect perfectly counterbalances the reduction in rent dissipation due to competitors’ exit. Hence, unlike redistributive rent-seeking, in productive rent-seeking the total social loss remains equal to the entire rent even when parties grow stronger or the number of players increases.     

X-efficiency,rent-seeking and social costs

This paper investigates shifts in cost functions of monopoly and regulated firms operating under conditions of X-inefficiency and rent-seeking behavior. We show that X-inefficiency and rent seeking have significantly different implications for economic welfare. Distinctions are drawn between pecuniary and real X-inefficiency and between sunk and continuing rent-seeking costs. In general, for a given cost shift rent-seeking behavior implies larger social costs than does X-inefficiency theory. However, cost shifts caused by either X-inefficiency or rent seeking are observationally equivalent. This implies empirically measured cost shifts cannot unambiguously be attributed to either cause.     

A multi-winner nested rent-seeking contest

Public Choice - This paper considers a symmetric imperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contest in which there may be several winners. We first demonstrate a serious flaw in previous work and then...     

Risk-aversion and prudence in rent-seeking games

This paper considers a common n-agent symmetric rent-seeking game. It derives conditions so that risk-aversion and risk always decrease rent-seeking efforts. These conditions hold for any regular contest success function when risk-averse rent-seekers are also prudent. Under n=2, prudence is a necessary and sufficient condition for risk-aversion to decrease rent-seeking efforts compared to risk-neutrality. An intuition for this result is given based on a self-protection model.