Rent-seeking behaviour of retaliating agents

This paper has examined a rent-seeking game where the players take a more sophisticated approach to evaluating the potential strategies and counter-strategies of their rivals than in the standard Nash case. We have derived the conditions for the existence of symmetric and nonsymmetric equilibria for the game and derived the properties of these equilibria. Three results merit repeating. First, we find that rent dissipation will not, in general, be complete. Second, and in contrast to much of the traditional literature, we find that the socially optimal result of zero rent-seeking is sometimes a feasible equilibrium outcome for our game. Finally, there exist rent-seeking configurations in which the best play of one of the rivals is to withdraw from the game or, alternatively stated, where it is not optimal for a rival to contest the rent by entering the game. In these nonsymmetric cases it would appear that Tullock's conjecture about the value of preemptive moves remains valid. This is true even when the strategies and counter-strategies available to the players are much more complex than in the traditional Nash approach.As a final point we raise the issue of whether or not it is reasonable to suppose that the players in rent-seeking games will take their strategy and counter-strategy sets to be as large as we have assumed in this paper. Players may well make their moves and counter-moves based upon rules of thumb or other considerations that effectively bound the strategy sets of the players. As well, it may be useful to consider games where players, upon entering the game, commit themselves to a given level of expenditures. Many of these issues are considered in a related paper by the authors.     

Can Political Inequalities Be Educated Away? Evidence from a Large‐Scale Reform

Over the years, many suggestions have been made on how to reduce the importance of family background in political recruitment. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of one such proposal: the expansion of mass education. We utilize a difference‐in‐difference strategy to analyze how a large school reform launched in Sweden in the 1950s, which lengthened schooling and postponed tracking, affected the likelihood of individuals with different family backgrounds to run for public office. The data come from public registers and pertain to the entire Swedish population born between 1943 and 1955. The empirical analysis provides strong support for the view that improved educational opportunities for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds can be an effective means to reduce the social bias of elected assemblies.     

Developmental tendencies in the situation of East Elbian rural labourers ∗

Abstract

Whereas orthodox economists supported the liberalization of goods and capital markets in the current global era, they typically assumed away the need to liberalize labour markets at an international level. The unexpected rise and then persistence of international immigration indicated the shortcomings of the orthodox account in theory and practice. Various recurring and contradictory or unsupported narratives were developed to ‘explain away’ the necessity or desirability of a policy of free migration, and this in spite of an ideology that otherwise promoted liberalization and choice in matters affecting goods and factor markets. There was, finally, a normative contradiction at the core of the orthodox account.     

The “Breadbasket” Is Empty: The Options of Sudanese Development Policy

Alison Des Forges, a renowned scholar and human rights activist of Central Africa, died in an airplane crash in 2009. Her life is a model of the conjunction of human rights activism and scholarship; it therefore illuminates the relations between these two forms of participation in African Studies. This article commemorates her work, showing how her scholarship enriched her human rights work, and how, in turn, her scholarship was driven by her sense of social justice. The article analyses five domains of her work: her 1972 dissertation; her participation in human rights reporting; a series of Human Rights Watch reports which she wrote or edited; her magisterial work on the genocide of 1994; and her continued scholarly publications after the genocide. From this, it argues that Des Forges's life work exemplified the mutually reinforcing nature of these two forms of commitment - scholarship and work towards human rights and social justice.     

Firm size,age and efficiency: Evidence from Kenyan manufacturing firms

Translog stochastic frontier production functions are estimated using an unbalanced panel of 235 Kenyan manufacturing firms in the food, wood, textile and metal sectors. The sectors are estimated individually in order to investigate whether technical efficiency is systematically related to the size and age of firms. The evidence suggests that firm size has a positive and significant effect in the wood and textile sectors. The age effect is less systematic, but is insignificant in all sectors, except textiles.