the solution to the tullock rent seeking game when r 2 mixed strategy equilibria and mean dissipation rates in tullock s rent seeking model the probability a player wins the game depends on expenditures raised to the power r we show that a symmetric mixed strategy nash equilibrium exists when r 2 and that overdissipation of rents does not arise in any nash equilibrium we derive a tight lower bound on the level of rent dissipation that arises in a symmetric equilibrium when the strategy space is discrete and show that full rent dissipation occurs when the strategy space is continuous our results are shown to be consistent with recent experimental evidence on the dissipation of rents

nonfundamental speculation revisited we show that a linear pure strategy equilibrium may not exist in the model of madrigal 1996 contrary to the claim of the original paper this is because madrigal s characterization of a pure strategy equilibrium omits a second order condition if the nonfundamental speculator s information about noise trading is sufficiently precise a linear pure strategy equilibrium fails to exist in parameter regions where a pure strategy equilibrium does exist we identify a few calculation errors in madrigal 1996 that result in misleading implications

open access and academic journal quality ing from complicated signaling behavior by informed authors lerner and tirole show that adding upstream private information does not alter their basic analysis their proposition 4 454 aea papers and proceedings may 2005

price discrimination by a many product firm determining the optimal selling strategy for a multiproduct firm facing consumers with unknown tastes is a difficult task this paper aims to show how almost optimal nonlinear tariffs can often be found when the number of products becomes large

open access journals and academics behavior the rising star of scholarly publishing is open access oa even some traditional journals now offer this option on author payment and many full freely accessible journals are now available to scholars providing relief to research institutions increasingly unable to afford the escalating subscription rates of serials however proper recognition of full oa journals by the community remains a major obstacle to overcome if they are to become a viable alternative for scholarly communication through a survey this work investigates economics scholars attitudes to oa and attempts to outline the state of practices and norms governing individuals publication choices jel l17 l86 o33

an estimate of resource expenditures on transfer activity in the united states this paper details resource expenditures on nonexchange noncharity transfer activity in the united states in 1985 expenditures designed to facilitate and inhibit nonexchange transfers executed privately or through the state are reported the numbers indicate that individuals plausibly invested nearly a trillion dollars in transfer activity that year nominal gnp in 1985 was just over 4 trillion which includes numerous transfer related resource investments that arguably should be subtracted out transfer activity thus apparently constitutes a much larger fraction of all economic activity conducted in the united states than previously recognized

revisiting advance disclosure of insider trading abstract we derive a parametric restriction necessary and sufficient for an equilibrium to exist in the model of lenkey 2014 given this restriction the equilibrium is unique correcting findings in the original article that multiple equilibria may exist with advance disclosure

rigging the lobbying process an application of the all pay auction textabstractin a world where a politician can explicitly auction off a prize to the high bidder the standard auction literature can be used to analyse political behavior the justice system however precludes politicians from explicitly selling the prize to the highest bidder thus politicians cannot let it become public knowledge that they are in the business of selling political favors an institution has emerged in political markets to overcome this constraint which are termed as lobbying lobbyists make implicit payments to the politician through campaign contributions if these up front payments were rebated to those failing to receive the prize it would be clear that the politician was selling favors this article has examined an interesting principle arising in all pay auctions this principle states that a politician wishing to maximize political rents may find it in his best interest to exclude certain lobbyists from participating in the lobbying process particularly lobbyists valuing most the political prize

collection sales good or bad for journals this paper discusses the impact of collection sales i e the bundling of several journals for sale by publishers to libraries on journals the advent of electronic journal distribution implies that bundling is an efficient sales strategy and can act to extend the reach of a journal current arrangements are discussed and shown to lead to tensions between commercial publishers and non profit journals the paper argues that non profit journals should not necessarily abandon collection sales programmes rather non profit journals may benefit from withdrawing from commercial publishers which distribute their own for profit journals and joining together to be distributed by less commercial publishers who set relatively low prices for their collections

gordon tullock entrepreneur of public choice when gordon tullock first encountered james m buchanan in 1957 as an initial step in his transition from the bureaucracy of the u s department of state to the ivy league atmosphere of the university of virginia he carried with him a voluminous manuscript on bureaucracy that he had tried unsuccessfully to publish buchanan 1987a 11 although eight years would pass before that manuscript eventually would be published three years after publication of the calculus of consent 1962 tullock s pioneering instincts already had directed him to the as yet uncharted path of public choice already had alerted him to the ubiquitous presence of homo economicus in the marketplace of politics buchanan quickly recognized the potential importance of combining tullock s insight with his own wicksellian notion of the importance of consent in political process as the basis for a radical research program trespassing across the traditional boundaries of economics and politics ignoring tullock s lack of formal training in economics buchanan installed him in the thomas jefferson center for studies in political economy and thereby provided that crucially important initial support absent which many a potential entrepreneur has failed to fulfill his talent steadfast in this judgment and firm in his resolve buchanan later was to gamble his own career together with the future of the virginia school of political economy in a 1968 exodus from charlottesville as the left leaning ideologically activist bureaucracy of thomas jefferson s academy thrice denied tullock a well earned promotion to full professor breit 1986 buchanan s judgment was sound and the virginia school reemerged unscathed and fortified as buchanan and his protege regrouped in the foothills of the appalachian mountains to carry the baton of the virginia public choice research

free labor for costly journals there is a remarkable difference between the prices that commercial publishers charge to libraries for economics journals and the prices charged by professional societies and university presses this price difference does not reflect a difference in quality the six most cited economics journals listed in the social science citation index are all nonprofit journals and their library subscription prices average about 180 per year only five of the 20 most cited journals are owned by commercial publishers and the average price of these five journals is about 1660 per year tables 1 and 2 compare library costs and measures of cost effectiveness for the ten most cited nonprofit journals and the ten most cited journals owned by commercial presses the average price per page of the commercial journals is about six times as high and the average price per citation is about 16 times as high as for the nonprofit journals in tables 1 and 2 the first column shows the year 2001 library subscription price and the second column shows the price per page calculated by dividing year 2001 price by the number of pages published in the year 2000 the third column reports the price per citation this is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that articles in this journal were cited in 1998 as recorded by the social science citation index the fourth column price per recent citation is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that the 1996 and 1997 volumes of the journal were cited in 1998 the citation rank is found by ranking journals according to the number of times that this journal was cited in 1998 the differences in prices and cost effectiveness between nonprofit and commercial journals are similar for less prestigious journals i have assembled a data

characterizing equilibrium rent seeking behavior a reply to tullock rent seeking contests can have different rules for designating the successful rent seeker we have investigated the case where the rule is that the successful rent seeker is the contender who has made the greatest outlay in the rentseeking quest hillman and samet this issue it is well known that for such contests there exists no nash equilibrium in pure strategies i e contenders choosing outlays as strategies we show however that there does exist a unique equilibrium in mixed strategies the equilibrium has the characteristic that the expected value of outlays made by the rival contenders equals the value of the prize being contested without regard for the number of contenders hence for any number of contenders rent dissipation is expecta

risk averse rent seekers and the social cost of monopoly power there is now quite general recognition that the social cost of monopoly power encompasses the resources expended by individuals seeking to become the beneficiaries of monopoly rents however since the activity of rent seeking is generally not observable direct estimates of resources expended in quests to acquire monopoly power are usually impossible to come by 1 as a consequence the indirect approach of taking the observed value of monopoly rents as indicative of the unobserved value of the resources expended in rent seeking is quite generally adopted in approaches to evaluation of the social cost of such activity

rent dissipation when rent seekers are budget constrained in the original tullock 1975 1980 game an individual bidder s probability of winning with a bid b is proportional to br where the exponent reflects economies of scale in rent seeking different interpretations can be given to these probabilities first one may view r as a reflection of the political culture alternatively one may view r as a choice variable for a politician intuition suggests that a society with a high tolerance for the selling of political favors and politicians who are receptive to rent seeking would both induce greater rent seeking expenditures than other societies all else equal this paper shows that a lower value of r can actually lead to more rent dissipation than a higher value this paper also reinforces two points concerning rent seeking first the analysis confirms the robustness of under dissipation of rents even in the face of entry second it points out the importance of distinguishing between rent seeking expenditures and rent dissipation when bidders must borrow for example total expenditure may understate rent dissipation

long lived private information and imperfect competition we develop a multi period auction model in which multiple privately informed agents strategically exploit their long lived information we show that such traders compete aggressively and cause most of their common private information to be revealed very rapidly in the limit as the interval between auctions approaches zero market depth becomes infinite and all private information is revealed immediately these results are in contrast to those of kyle 1985 in which the monopolistic informed trader causes his information to be incorporated into prices gradually and when the interval between auctions is vanishingly small market depth is constant over time fama 1970 defines a strong form efficient market as one in which security prices fully reflect all available information including both publicly and privately held information in a pioneering and influential article kyle 1985 develops a model in which a single privately informed trader with long lived information optimally exploits his monopoly power over time kyle s 1985 main results are i the informed trader trades in a gradual manner so that his information is incorporated into prices at a slow almost linear rate and ii when auctions are held continuously the depth of the market is constant over time however kyle s 1985 assumption of a single informed trader is strong in the sense that in actual financial markets it is reasonable to expect that at least a few players will have access to private information and will trade in the knowledge that they will face competition with other informed agents in the market 1 we develop a multi period auction model in which multiple strategic informed traders optimally exploit their long lived informational advantage we thus explore the restrictiveness of kyle s assumption of a single informed trader and also examine

the cost of rent seeking evidence from cellular telephone license lotteries the inventors of the theory of rent seeking used an analogy with competitive markets to conclude that all monopoly rents would be dissipated in the competition to obtain the property rights to them 23 29 subsequent theorists showed that this conclusion is quite sensitive to assumptions about foresight risk aversion conjectures and bias 15 21 30 since little quantitative information about actual rent seeking competitions is available the theory has developed in an empirical vacuum in this paper we attempt to fill that vacuum with an estimate of rent seeking expenditure by applicants in the federal communications commission s fcc cellular telephone license lotteries held between 1986 and 1989 we go on to compare expenditures with estimates of the value of the licenses at stake these lotteries constitute a unique natural experiment any u s citizen was eligible to enter each geographic lottery once and only once for an expense which we calculate as modest the lotteries were widely publicized and heavily entered there were over 320 000 applications one per market filed for 643 cellular licenses and third party application preparers entered the market rapidly because licenses were awarded sequentially prospective participants in later lotteries could find out that expected net returns from earlier lotteries were positive because of undersubscription the value of the prize was known because sales of previously awarded licenses had begun to take place before later lotteries were held and market analysts were using such sale prices to value licenses not yet awarded the later lotteries seem almost optimally contrived to maximize the dissipation of rents yet comparing the resources invested in entry the price of a fully prepared application with the rents available the market value of cellular telephone licenses shows that dissipation was far short of complete

non fundamental speculation we study an intertemporal asset market where insiders coexist with non fundamental speculators non fundamental speculators possess no private information on fundamental values of assets but have superior knowledge about some aspect of the market environment we show that the entry of these rational speculators can lead to reductions in market liquidity and in the information content of prices even in an efficient market also equilibrium trades display patterns of empirical interest for example speculators appear to chase trends and lose money after market overreactions while insiders trade as contrarians and profit after such overreactions

lottery versus all pay auction models of lobbying i first provide a complete characterization of the unique equilibrium of the lottery game by n lobbyists with asymmetric valuations and then compare the lottery and the all pay auction models of lobbying i show that the exclusion principle discovered by baye kovenock and de vries 1993 for all pay auction does not apply to lottery i also show that the perverse effect that an exogenous cap may increase the total lobbying expenditure in a two bidder all pay auction discovered by che and gale 1998 does not apply to lottery

pricing of scientific journals and market power we analyze the empirical relationship between journal prices their quality measured by their citation counts their age as well as conduct of publishers the database covers 22 scientific fields and over 2600 among the most highly reputed and cited journals in 2003 we show that a for profit journals charge roughly 3 times more than journals run by scientific societies b the number of citations has a positive impact on prices c there are large differences in prices across fields that vary from 1 and 6 these are highly and positively correlated with the degree of concentration in the industry

academic journal pricing and the demand of libraries the prices of for profit academic journals have increased rapidly over the past decade barbara albee and brenda dingley 2001 there remains substantial debate as to the explanation for these increases among those put forward are the increased concentration of the journal industry see e g mccabe 2002 and the relatively recent effort by major publishers to bundle print and electronic journals aaron s edlin and rubinfeld 2004 while both explanations are undoubtedly important what is missing is the significant role of the primary customers of journal publishers the academic libraries as agents of college and university faculties libraries serve the interests of their principals while having only limited information about faculty journal demands facing little or no hard budget constraint faculty are unlikely or unwilling to make difficult allocative choices as a result libraries have been making hard choices for years between journals and books and among journals in a world of increasing budgetary pressure given that electronic transmission of knowledge is becoming increasingly important an understanding of the reasons for the increases in journal prices is a vital element in the ongoing discussion of best mechanisms by which scholarly communications can be disseminated in this paper we formulate a model of library journal demand and suggest how it can be used to analyze the optimal pricing of journals by publishers this represents part of a larger project whose long range goal is to explain the pattern of journal pricing over time and to evaluate two broad policy questions i to what extent have mergers and or bundling practices been responsible for the increase in journal prices ii to what extent are journal prices likely to change in response to changing library acquisition strategies reallocation of budgets between serials and books journal sharing among libraries setting hard budgets etc