collusion collective action and protection theory and evidence this paper provides a novel explanation forthe formation of protectionist lobby groupsin imperfectly competitive sectors thelevel of collusion is shown to be a crucialdeterminant of the ability of firms tosustain lobbying we show that greatercollusion reduces firm contributionsto tariff lobbying when the governmentvalues welfare sufficiently and thecross price elasticity between the domesticand foreign goods is sufficiently high the empirical evidence from the u s supports the theory greater collusionreduces the level of pac contributions

the political economics of agricultural price support in turkey an empirical assessment the present study is an attempt to explain the variations in the extent of protection provided to the producers of four selected agricultural crops in turkey by a set of independent variables representing various economic and political events of the 1962 1983 period the economic variables were selected in order to assess the divergence between the intentions of the policy makers and their actions as reflected in the level of support actually provided while the political variables were chosen to assess the impact of elections military takeovers and noticeable shifts in the underlying philosophy of the policy makers on the support provided the regression analysis suggested that the political power of the agricultural producers was an important determinant of the policies implemented especially during times of democratic practices that during times of military regimes the agricultural sector tends to be less protected that there is indirect evidence for the existence of political business cycles synchronized to political elections and that general conditions in the economy can influence the behavioral rule of the policy makers

unlootable resources and state security institutions in tajikistan and uzbekistan why when faced with similar conditions of weakening central control do some institutions of state security fragment into autonomous agents of organized violence whereas others cohere around coerc

how does free trade become institutionalised an expected utility model of the chretien era this paper seeks to go beyond the question of why free trade and pursues issues related to the tendency for controversial free trade agreements to become institutionalised in other words why do opponents of free trade not mobilise to overturn it even more puzzling why do opposition parties which had opposed passage of free trade in the first place not undo liberalisation undertaken by their predecessors upon coming to power rather than seek reversal it is not uncommon for free trade opponents upon assuming control of the government to deepen liberalisation initiatives hence serving to institutionalise the very policies they had decried vigorously seven sections make up this study it begins with a statement of the basic puzzle and an illustration in the recent canadian context the second section is a theoretical discussion of opposition parties and free trade an expected utility model based on the limits of rent seeking is introduced in the third and fourth sections to explain institutionalised free trade the fifth section provides the background to the case at hand that is the evolution of free trade as a politico economic issue in canada the sixth section applies the expected utility model to the superficially puzzling case of canadian prime minister jean chretien s dramatic about face on the issue of trade liberalisation after coming to power in the final section the contributions of the model are reviewed along with directions for future research

garp for kids on the development of rational choice behavior in this paper we examine the extent to which consumption choices by 7 and 11 year old children and college undergraduates satisfy the axioms of revealed preference we find that choices by even the 7 year olds are considerably more likely to obey revealed preference axioms than would be true if they were choosing randomly 11 year olds do better still while college students do no better than 11 year old children we also find that mathematical ability is not correlated with choosing rationally we argue that this evidence suggests that the ability to choose rationally is not innate but that it does develop quickly

the shape of public choice to come some predictions and advice in the normal course of events elders are sometimes called upon to reflect on the past while the more youthful set about deciding the future for the most part i shall honor the dictum but offer some unsolicited advice on what needs to be done and be so bold as to predict these suggestions will be acted upon a kind of self fulfilling prophecy of course the advice may be rejected or ignored what then

rational irrationality and the microfoundations of political failure models of inefficient political failure have been criticized forimplicitly assuming the irrationality of voters wittman 1989 1995 1999 coate and morris 1995 building on caplan s 1999a 1999b model of rational irrationality the current papermaintains that the assumption of voter irrationality is boththeoretically and empirically plausible it then examinesmicrofoundational criticisms of four classes of political failuremodels rent seeking pork barrel politics bureaucracy andeconomic reform in each of the four cases incorporating simpleforms of privately costless irrationality makes it possibleto clearly derive the models standard conclusions moreover itfollows that efforts to mitigate political failures will besocially suboptimal as most of the literature implicitlyassumes it is a mistake to discount the empirical evidence forthese models on theoretical grounds

toward a public choice theory of monopoly regulation its many dimensions from the perspective of market economics this new thrust was consolidated in 1976 by s peltzman who developed a formal market model in which regulations were viewed as commodities brokered via political markets in response to bids and counter bids by those who stood to gain or to lose from specific regulation outcomes the subsequent contribution by becker 1983 added insights and institutional flesh to the stigler peltzman embryo confirming regulation as an integral component of mainstream market economics an important implication of such contributions especially those from the chicago perspective is that regulation for the most part confirms resource efficiency within market process that political markets in the absence of entry barriers are just as effective as are competitive commodity markets in achieving economic efficiency defined within a comparative institutions framework nowhere is this complacency more apparent than in the conclusion drawn by becker 1983 from a detailed formal analysis of competition among pressure groups for political influence

a multi winner nested rent seeking contest 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 go on to suggest an alternative method for analyzing the contest in contrast to the previous work we show that the value of the rent is fully dissipated in equilibrium as the number of players becomes large

the economics of development a survey i the subject our definition of the subject will be the use of economic analysis to understand the economies of poor or developing countries this includes in particular how standards of living in the population are determined and how they change over time and further how policy can or should be used in the influence of these processes the definition contains in principle much or most of analytical methods in economics insofar as they can be put to use in the examination of the issues of interest this is as it should be but it poses a problem for a survey in a journal a comprehensive treatment is infeasible so we shall follow a different route the survey will focus on what i take to be the major themes and approaches which characterise the productive aspects of the subject there is therefore no pretence at being exhaustive the purpose is rather to highlight some of the advances many of these have been of real substance there are a number of possible purposes for a survey and it is important to be clear at the outset for whom it is intended what it is and what it is not this survey is addressed to economists and students of economics who know the tools of their trade but not necessarily how they have been applied to and fashioned for the analysis of the economics of developing countries it is a description of the ways in which problems can be productively formulated and approached in terms of examples chosen for their intrinsic importance and interest the vastness of the subject means that we have to be highly selective it does not seek to provide a summary evaluation of the current view of the appropriate response to immediate policy questions it is not a history of thought nor a research manifesto nor an attempt to adjudicate or settle the major debates where they arise naturally from the major purpose some judgements on these subjects will be offered but they do not themselves constitute the primary intent of this survey there are three lines of enquiry or sets of questions which have i suggest been distinctive of the most fruitful work in development economics they will

bad loans to good friends money politics and the developmental state in south korea why has the literature on asian development not addressed the issue of money politics in south korea how can we reconcile the view of an efficient developmental state in south korea before 1997 with reports of massive corruption and inefficiency in that same country in 1998 and 1999 politics is central to the answer in this study i make two arguments first money politics was extensive in south korea both during and after the high growth era second political not economic considerations dominated policymaking this study explains both past and present and compares the patterns of money politics in the early post independence era with those that arose after the democratic transition in 1987 while during the park era a balance of power between businessmen and politicians kept corruption from spinning out of control the transition to democracy altered the basic business state relationship allowing business to exert greater influence over policy decisions the political hypothesis advanced in this study suggests a new direction for our research about the developmental state

capture and the bureaucratic mafia does the revolving door erode bureaucratic integrity does the revolving door phenomenon erode bureaucratic integrity to answer this question we undertake a quantitative case study of a private university in south korea that recruited a former vice minister of education as its president specifically we investigate whether after employing this high ranking former public official the university received favorable treatment from the education ministry in terms of funding estimates from difference in difference triple difference and synthetic control methods all suggest that the high profile public official s recruitment is associated with financial benefits from the official s former employing agency no such advantage however was observed for benefits from other agencies this result offers suggestive but compelling evidence that the revolving door distorts the allocation of government resources the financial benefits the university received are due not to the recruited official s greater competence expertise or knowledge but rather to his implicit collusion with the government

gordon tullock creative maverick of public choice economics traditionally has been defined by both its methods and its subject matter tullock has been a creative maverick in developing and applying new models of interaction outside the traditional areas of market exchange by using the tools of economic analysis in an exploratory and venturesome manner he has openend new areas of inquiry the debate about tullock s contributions is important because it expands our understanding of the development of public choice and demonstrates tullock s role in opening new areas of economic research

rent seeking and market competition this paper emphasizes that political behavior of interest groups is a result of economic calculation and therefore is affected by the market conditions under which they operate we develop a two stage game to link political and market decision making we find that if unproductive rent seekingdirectly contributes to rent seekers market operations then their lobbying efforts will be excessive if the number of outsiders is relatively large restrained if it is relatively small if rent seekingdirectly impairs rent seekers market operations the above described behavior will be reversed the analysis also reveals that as wasteful rent seeking may increase rent seeker s production cost market competition shifts production from now less efficient rent seekers to their non rent seeking rivals welfare gains from this shift may overshadow the direct waste of influence activities

the impact of income on the taste for revolt the question of how the level of development affects revolutionary support in society is of fundamental importance one approach to provide an answer has been to study the relationship between actual civil conflict and income at the national level this article takes a different approach it uses microdata sets based on surveys of revolutionary support across one quarter of a million people and identifies how the responses vary with their incomes we find that a rise in gdp of us 1 600 per capita in 2001 values decreases the chances of supporting revolt by 2 4 percentage points which represents a 41 drop in the proportion of people wanting a revolution for a person who jumps from the bottom to top income quartile within their country the probability declines by a similar amount the results are robust to controlling for country and year effects country specific time trends and take account of the potential endogeneity of gdp

repeated contests a general parameterization abstract contests often involve players vying for the same prize year after year this paper characterizes equilibrium effort both individual and aggregate in a general parameterization of such repeated contests

how pollution taxes may increase pollution and reduce net revenues this paper develops a positive theory of pollution taxation by a federal authority when pollution abatement subsidies are used by local governments environmental and industry lobby groups influence governments with campaign contributions first pollution may increase in the pollution tax because the abatement subsidy increases decreases with the tax and pollution increases decreases in the abatement subsidy this occurs because the lobbying incentives change at a pollution tax reform second pollution taxes may reduce net revenues because subsidy expenditures rise third pollution may increase simultaneously as net revenues fall finally the welfare effect of a pollution tax may be negative

rent seeking in a market with morality solving a puzzle about corporate social responsibility rent seeking by lobbying for government favors is generally thought to be wasteful in view of this wastefulness it is puzzling that rent seeking by corporations has not been criticized as a failure to be socially responsible or even as an unethical business practice this article examines the compatibility of rent seeking with corporate social responsibility by utilizing thomas dunfee s idea of a marketplace with morality this idea is useful for solving this puzzle because in considering whether rent seeking is compatible with corporate social responsibility it is necessary first to define rent seeking which this article argues is a normative concept and second to find some principled way of identifying rent seeking behavior it also solves the puzzle about rent seeking by revealing that the concept of rent seeking itself is of little use in determining whether certain conduct is or is not socially responsible since rent seeking activity cannot be identified without first evaluating which activity is rent seeking

contests with multi tasking the standard contest model in which participants compete in a single dimension is well understood and documented multi dimension extensions are possible but are liable to increase the complexity of the contest structure mitigating one of its main advantages simplicity in this paper we propose an extension in which competition ensues in several dimensions and a competitor that wins a certain number of these is awarded a prize the amount of information needed to run the contest is hence limited to the number of dimensions won by each player we look at the design of this contest from the point of view of maximising effort in the contest per dimension and totally and show that there will be a tendency to run small contests with few dimensions the standard tullock model and its results are encompassed by our framework

economists and public policy chicago political economy versus conventional views both conventional welfare economics and public choice analysis suggest that economists have an important educational role to play in the public policy process in improving the decision making process in sharp contrast information and incentive problems related to voting rules the bureaucracy and the legislature do not arise in cpe because these processes are all perfect agents of interest groups consequently the political process is efficient and there is no scope for beneficial economic analysis as it relates to the sugar program or other public policies that is the polity is efficient or it would be reordered by competing interest groups to make it so but as mitchell 1989 290 stresses the important unanswered question in cpe remains if there is no scope for improvement how and why does change occur

the industrial structure of the california assembly committee assignments economic interests and campaign contributions this paper examines the provision of campaign contributions made by economic interests to incumbents seeking reelection in the 1984 1986 and 1988 california assembly elections the study tests whether the distribution of campaign contributions by specific industrial sectors corresponds to legislator possession of the policy property rights associated with membership on relevant assembly standing committees a non parametric statistical model compares the distribution of campaign contributions from groups within a given industrial sector to members of relevant policy committees with the distribution of contributions from all other contributor classes the empirical analysis confirms that committee assignments significantly affect the allocation of special interest resources in assembly elections substantiating the importance of institutional considerations in influencing special interest activity

a general equilibrium model of two group conflict with endogenous intra group sharing rules this paper explores the interactions among intra group sharing rules the competition between two groups over the common pool of output and the allocation of resources between productive and appropriate activities in the interior solution the use of egalitarian method for the distribution of group income among members plays no distributional role but only affects the allocation of resources it releases resources into the productive sector from the group that adopts the egalitarian rule by making the internal conflict among the members less intense the sequential choice of intra group sharing rules and resource allocations produce the adoption of fully egalitarian intra group sharing rules in both groups these rules minimize the amount of resources allocated to appropriate activities and maximize the welfare level of all individuals in the economy this result suggests that inter group competition with the use of egalitarian principle in the distribution of group income among group members which is not available to the hobbesian state of nature is one of the cheaper social devices in restraining individuals from engaging in costly appropriative activities

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

why and when do governments initiate public enterprise reform initiating public enterprise reform is a complex decision influenced by economic factors as well as the ideological biases and personalities of political leaders nevertheless the use of a contracting framework yields important generalizations about what drives the decision this article argues that the decision depends fundamentally on the potential efficiency gains from the reform and its associated transactions costs costs arise because of asymmetries in information and opportunism problems that usually plague contract negotiations the article identifies observable variables that may affect either the potential gains or the transactions costs uses them to construct a simple probit decision making model and tests the model using data from fifteen developing countries over a twenty year period

corporate political offices in a rent seeking society this paper explores the logic of a corporation s decision whether to create a political lobbying department or to hire fee for service lobbyists it does so by adapting the rent seeking model of interest group behavior tullock 1980 rowley tollison tullock 1988 hillman riley 1989 in a sequential game after the corporation decides whether or not to create an internal political department a public interest group determines whether it will challenge a government policy that benefits the corporation in the final period the corporation can continue to fund its in house political staff or it can hire political influence from outside the firm the analysis focuses on the logic of the interaction of the corporation and the public interest group the analysis compares the results obtained by a subgame perfect equilibrium analysis and another game that allows the corporation to precommit itself to a long term political department a variety of comparative statics results are discussed

adam smith s theory of moral sentiments on morals and why they matter to a liberal society of free people and free markets this essay describes smith s analysis of ethics in his theory of moral sentiments the interaction of our nature and our nurturing that makes common civic ethics possible and the dynamic interaction of individuals and extant societal constructions that can lead to ever more mature systems of civic ethics and thus toward those conditions necessary for a constructive sustainable liberal system

estimating the performance effects of business groups in emerging markets business groups confederations of legally independent firms are ubiquitous in emerging economies yet very little is known about their effects on the performance of affiliated firms we conceive of business groups as responses to market failures and high transaction costs in doing so we develop hypotheses about the effects of group affiliation on firm profitability affiliation could either boost or depress firm profitability and members of a group are likely to earn rates of return similar to other members of the same group using a unique data set compiled largely from local sources we test for these effects in 14 emerging markets argentina brazil chile india indonesia israel mexico peru the philippines south africa south korea taiwan thailand and turkey we find evidence that business groups indeed affect the broad patterns of economic performance in 12 of the markets we examine group affiliation appears to have as profound an effect on profitability as does industry membership yet strategy scholars have a much clearer grasp of industries than of groups moreover membership in a group raises the profitability of the average group member in several of the markets we examine this runs contrary to the wisdom conventional in advanced economies that unrelated diversification depresses profitability overall our findings suggest that the roots of sustained differences in profitability may vary across institutional contexts conclusions drawn in one context may well not apply to another copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

peasants or bankers the american electorate and the u s economy t he usual model of electoral reaction to economic conditions assumes the retrospective economic voter who bases expectations solely on recent economic performance or personal economic experience voter as peasant a second model assumes a sophisticated economic voter who incorporates new information about the future into personal economic expectations voter as banker using the components both retrospective and prospective of the index of consumer sentiment ics as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval we find that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series with aggregate consumer expectations about long term business conditions in the approval equation neither the usual economic indicators not the other ics components matter moreover short term changes in consumer expectations respond more to current forecasts than to the current economy the qualitative result is a rational expectations outcome the electorate anticipates the economic future and rewards or punishes the president for economic events before they happen economics moves political behavior with hard times administrations lose support with good times they gain it we know this to be true but when we ask how by what processes the political translation of economic experience occurs the an

illegal markets and the social costs of rent seeking this paper argues that making goods or services illegal results in an increase in the social costs associated with rent seeking the increased social cost is in the form of negative externalities that result from market participants use of coercion and violence in attempts to control trade in the illegal good consequently the social costs of rent seeking will exceed the value of resources dissipated in rent seeking competition and where the external costs exceed the undissipated portion of the tullock cost the social cost of rent seeking is greater than the sum of tullock and harberger costs

the empirical measurement of rent seeking costs this survey focuses on the efforts carried out mainly by public choice scholars to measure the social cost of rent seeking the concept introduced by gordon tullock in 1967 and coined by anne krueger in 1974 is well known and accepted by the profession but its empirical measurement has fallen behind with respect to its theoretical formulation an often criticized lack in the literature although there are good general surveys none has specifically focused on reviewing the empirical efforts made to measure the phenomenon the purpose of this paper is to provide such a survey it could be said that the rent seeking concept has been fully integrated into economic jargon it is commonly used when some agent seeks to obtain an artificial transfer usually from government and covers all the actions efforts or expenses that the agent has to carry out to obtain the prize the key issue however is the possible social waste that arises in these situations the empirical efforts to measure such waste constitute the main purpose of this survey the concept of rent seeking was introduced by tullock 1967 although the term was first coined by krueger 1974 in a paper not related to the former in a recent paper tullock himself wrote of the history of the concept and the intellectual context within which it arose tullock 2003 starting with the pioneering work by harberger 1954 several studies were conducted during the 1950s in which the calculation of the social cost of monopolies and tariffs always gave the result of very modest figures the first response to these results was made by leibenstein 1966 and his x efficiency which refers to a hypothetical loss in efficiency due to the absence of competition shortly after leibenstein s paper appeared tullock argued that the deadweight costs of monopoly and tariffs understate the true social cost because the expenditures made to capture related rents have to be included so rectangles as well as harberger s triangles have to be included in the calculations let us see this argument once more figure 1 depicts the iconic tullock graphic analysis of rent seeking it represents the demand schedule d for a monopolized good where pm is the monopoly

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

decision by sortition a means to reduce rent seeking this essay gives an overview of how arandomized decision mechanism sortition can be expected to reduce the intensity ofself interested activity by rent seekingfactions within democracies the socialcosts of rent seeking are briefly reviewed i then make the case that randomization ofcollective decision making proceduresattenuates rent seeking expenditures iillustrate the argument by reference to thehighly contested presidential election of2000 finally i buttress that argument bycomparing plurality voting and sortitionwithin the context of tullock s efficient rent seeking model 1980

the economic theory of regulation and trucking deregulation shifting to the state level federal deregulation of the trucking industry in 1980 created a general gain in economic welfare at the expense of the monopoly rents of powerful interests leading some scholars to ponder the limitations of the economic theory of regulation however analyzing only the federal changes excludes evidence from the significant intrastate sector of the trucking industry regulation of which remains largely unchanged from that prior to 1980 this paper argues that after a decade of clear federal policy success truckers continue to capture most state regulators sustaining monopoly rents in what would otherwise be an inherently competitive industry using data from the fifty states we demonstrate the extent to which the economic theory is in fact consistent with trucking industry evidence

the political economy of underinvestment in agriculture abstract owners of sector specific factors form political lobbies in order to influence government policy in a closed economy public investment in agriculture shifts the internal terms of trade against agriculture due to engel s law and thereby increases the surplus of unorganized classes which cannot be appropriated by the lobbies as a result the latter push the government to increase subsidies or reduce taxes to their members at the expense of public investment which falls below its socially optimal level trade liberalization by making the terms of trade invariant to public investment tends to reduce the extent of under allocation of public investment in agriculture

a model of regulated open access resource use abstract this paper develops a model of regulated open access resource exploitation the regulatory model assumes that regulators are goal oriented choosing target harvest levels according to a safe stock concept these harvest quotas are implemented by setting season lengths conditioned on the industry fishing capacity the industry enters until rents are dissipated conditioned on season length regulations harvest levels fishing capacity season length and biomass are determined jointly using parameter estimates from the long regulated north pacific halibut fishery predictions of these variables from the regulated open access model are compared to predictions that arise from the gordon model

when are stable rights to rents bad stable enforceable property rights over resources normally furthers economic efficiency i argue that stable rights to government created rents and wealth transfers by contrast generate inefficiency secure rights to receive transfers increases rent seekers incentive to make political investments creating new transfers i demonstrate the point using a two period rent seeking game contestable transfers reduce the probability of establishing a transfer program and aggregate rent seeking expenditures strengthening transfer recipients rights increases the difficulty of eliminating a transfer program

rent seeking rent defending and rent dissipation in the preceding analyses of rent defending the posner model yielded welfare losses in excess of the combined areas of the tullock rectangle and the harberger triangle in only one instance furthermore this particular circumstance necessitated voluntary participation in a game with a negative expected value 13 for the tullock rogerson model the explicit addition of rent defenders had no impact on aggregate dissipation

can private learn from public governance corporate governance is importantly based on agency theory and relies on extrinsic incentives to align the interests of managers employees and shareholders this article argues that in view of recent corporate scandals private governance can learn from public governance 1 goaloriented intrinsic motivation of agents should be supported by fixed incomes and an extensive selection process of employees 2 extrinsic but non monetary incentives e g conferring orders and titles can be used 3 the power of actors should be restricted by a clear division of power appropriate rules of succession and institutionalised competition for positions in firms

rent seeking and the two track price system in china a simple general equilibrium model is specified to analyse the impact on the chinese economy of the introduction of a two track price system on to a centrally planned economy it is shown that national income will rise as a result together with a fall in the costs associated with rent seeking some estimates of welfare gains and costs of rent seeking are provided for seven commodities within a partial equilibrium framework they are shown to be dependent on the price elasticities of demand and supply the latter determine the ratio of plan to market prices and the share of plan in total output

incorporating groups into rational choice explanations of turnout an empirical test this study examines the problem of voter turnout from a rational choice perspective it reviews the paradox of voting and finds one model which incorporates the role of intermediary social groups and leaders to be a promising solution it tests the hypothesis that leader mobilization increases voter turnout using an ecological analysis of turnout in five montreal ethnic communities during three recent elections the 1993 canadian federal the 1994 quebec provincial and the 1994 montreal municipal elections data on mobilization are taken from semi directed interviews with association leaders in each community the results compare predicted and actual rankings of turnout for each community and election the overall results are weak indicating that the model does a poor job of predicting voter turnout

searching for economic rationale behind gated communities a public choice approach as millions of people world wide now live in residential areas with restricted access to the public the ascent of gated communities can no longer be attributed to incidental or deviant development hence this paper makes an attempt to discover the economic rationale behind the gated community phenomenon it discusses the mainstream theses and outlines 10 theorems for an alternative proposition based on theories of public choice and fiscal federalism the core theorem asserts that a centrally featured system of government diminishes the ability of local municipalities properly to reflect citizens demands for local public goods and services and that this constitutes a strong incentive for people to move into gated communities in particular gated and guarded residential developments represent an exit option when local municipalities fail to deploy vital governmental rules and instruments such as fiscal equivalence and benefit taxation

a tribute to earl a thompson and in his own words a summary of his general economic and social theory brilliant but little known in part because his style was dense and crucial papers unpublished earl thompson reformulated standard theory to achieve policy relevance focusing on significant rent seeking inefficiencies stemming from private information and transaction costs drawing on history he showed a vast array of institutions to be efficient which economists had previously found to be inefficient modeled governments and their nature defined government s functions and showed why dominant states rise and fall

tollison costs and technological innovation the case of environmental regulation this paper departs from the tullock cost paradigm that views competition for monopoly privilege as a welfare inimical process that wastefully dissipates preexisting producers surplus and occasionally leads to inefficient increases in costs and counterproductive uses of scarce resources the potential availability of rent seeking may bring about the elimination of inefficient regulatory regimes that retard or prevent the introduction of cost reducing innovations air quality management is but one area in which innovation rent seeking holds promise for concrete welfare gains researchers may wish to focus on institutional mechanisms designed to overcome the transactions costs and free rider disincentives to the formation of a coalition to seek innovation rents an example of such a mechanism might be a joint venture that requires all venture members to engage in lobbying and to contribute to collective research efforts these unaddressed questions await future research

a comparison of rent seeking models and economic models of conflict this paper provides a comparative analysis of the basic rent seeking model and a simple economic model of conflict each model is concerned with a game in which players invest resources in pursuit of a prize the purpose of the analysis is to elucidate structural differences between the two models and to analyse the consequent behavioral differences and equilibrium outcomes in the two cases a key finding is that where such comparisons are possible the conflict model tends to involve greater relative expenditure on wealth redistribution activities than does the rent seeking model

trajectories of fear and hope support for democracy in post communist europe prospects for the successful consolidation of democracy in post communist europe hinge substantially on the trajectory and determinants of popular support surveys in bulgaria czechoslovakia hung

the rational voter paradox revisited the rational voter paradox rests on two fundamental assumptions first that voters are risk neutral second that voters make decisive vote computations the implications of maximizing the expected utility of wealth rather than the utility of expected wealth are explored the validity of decisive vote computations are examined through concepts of weak and strict in the limit free rider assumptions the paper proposes a margin of victory model of voting behavior based on information levels and the political division of labor

the dynamics of lobbying a differential game this paper presents a dynamic model on lobbying the interactions between two competing lobbies who attempt to influence regulations and legislation are modelled as a differential game we consider for this game first a time consistent and then a subgame perfect equilibrium in linear markov strategies the subgame perfect equilibrium lowers considerably lobbying activity and expenses this provides a partial explanation of the puzzle that rent seeking expenses are often small compared with the prize sought

cultural institutions and value formation on the art market a rent seeking approach the formation of value in the artistic market can be specifically affected by the behavior of cultural institutions acting on it as monopolistic quality certifiers the rent maximizing strategy limits quantities to sub optimum levels and keeps prices and costs higher this can be worsened by institutional rent seeking the establishment s strategies cannot always be matched through public policies because this can result in an increase of monopoly social losses and of the establishment s lobbying efforts