governmental intervention approaches to promote renewable energies special emphasis on japanese feed in tariff abstract almost all countries have issued laws and regulations to promote renewable energy re however the applications and motivations of such laws as well as achievements have been different currently the japanese government has announced its targets to expand the electricity feed in tariff scheme for solar power along with other energy sources within two years to meet the goal set by the japanese prime minister who in the 15th united nations climate change conference cop15 held in september 2009 proclaimed to cut 25 of greenhouse gas ghg emissions from the 1990 levels by 2020 in this paper the current japanese energy policies and measures for promoting re in comparison to popular methods followed worldwide are explored furthermore a least cost feed in tariff lcfit simulation model for japanese case was developed to calculate the optimal mix of technologies to reach certain targets the lcfit also calculates the tariff that should be proposed for each technology and the total cost for the program with and without a carbon tax and estimates the premium added to the bill of the customer every month

an analysis of feed in tariff remuneration models implications for renewable energy investment recent experience from around the world suggests that feed in tariffs fits are the most effective policy to encourage the rapid and sustained deployment of renewable energy there are several different ways to structure a fit policy each with its own strengths and weaknesses this paper presents an overview of seven different ways to structure the remuneration of a fit policy divided into two broad categories those in which remuneration is dependent on the electricity price and those that remain independent from it this paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of these different fit models and concludes with an analysis of these design options with a focus on their implications both for investors and for society

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

rents dissipation and lost treasures comment in an interesting recent paper dari mattiacci and parisi 2005 extended tullock s 1980 rent seeking game with an entry decision the mixed strategies identified by dari mattiacci and parisi for the case of increasing returns in the contest success function r2 do not constitute an equilibrium of the game they study however these strategies are an equilibrium if the strategy space of the game is restricted by a minimum expenditure requirement and this minimum expenditure requirement is an element of a specific interval

efficient rents 2 free entry and efficient rent seeking in the competition for a monopoly right in which the number of bidders is fixed tullock and others have found the value of the resources spent in the aggregate to capture the transfer to be sometimes less than and sometimes greater than the value of the monopoly we think this approach to be incomplete since it leaves unanswered the question of what determines the number of individuals who will vie for the right to be the monopolist it is unsatisfactory to imagine for example that the franchisor sets the number of contestants one could then foresee that rent seeking would arise to influence the permissible number of bidders and this merely moves the rent seeking dissipation question one step back

racial discrimination in the labor market theory and empirics we review theories of race discrimination in the labor market taste based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread but no existing model explains the unemployment rate differential models of statistical discrimination based on differential observability of productivity across races can explain the pattern and magnitudes of wage differentials but do not address employment and unemployment at their current state of development models of statistical discrimination based on rational stereotypes have little empirical content it is plausible that models combining elements of the search models with statistical discrimination could fit the data we suggest possible avenues to be pursued and comment briefly on the implication of existing theory for public policy jel j15 j31 j64 j71

the social costs of monopoly and regulation posner reconsidered focuses on social costs of monopoly and trade regulation in the united states benefit of marginal changes on antitrust activities equality of cost in obtaining monopoly and expected profit of monopolist elasticity of inputs in obtaining monopoly ebsco

rent seeking with bounded rationality an analysis of the all pay auction the winner take all nature of all pay auctions makes the outcome sensitive to decision errors which we introduce with a logit formulation the equilibrium bid distribution is a fixed point the belief distributions that determine expected payoffs equal the choice distributions determined by expected payoffs we prove existence uniqueness and symmetry properties in contrast to the nash equilibrium the comparative statics of the logit equilibrium are intuitive rent dissipation increases with the number of players and the bid cost overdissipation of rents is impossible under full rationality but is observed in laboratory experiments our model predicts this property

heterogeneous risk loss aversion in complete information all pay auctions we extend previous theoretical work on n player complete information all pay auctions to incorporate heterogeneous risk and loss averse utility functions we provide sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of equilibria with a given set of active players with any strictly increasing utility functions and characterize the players equilibrium mixed strategies assuming that players can be ordered by their risk aversion player a is more risk averse than player b if whenever player b prefers a certain payment over a given lottery so does player a we find that in equilibrium the more risk averse players either bid higher than the less risk averse players and win with higher ex ante probability or they drop out furthermore while each player s expected bid decreases with the other players risk aversion her expected bid increases with her own risk aversion thus increasing a player s risk aversion creates two opposing effects on total expected bid a sufficient condition for the total expected bid to decrease with a player s risk aversion is that this player is relatively more risk averse compared to the rest of the players our findings have important implications for the literature on gender differences in competitiveness and for gender diversity in firms that use personnel contests for promotions

asymmetric contests with conditional investments rent seeking scenarios competitions for promotions and research and development r d races are examples of competitions in which participants expend resources regardless of whether they win or lose although similar in their all pay feature such competitions often differ in important dimensions these include the type of technologies employed in competition the type of asymmetries among competitors the degree to which expenditures are sunk and the number of prizes consider lobbying settings in which firms expend resources in order to influence a policymaker if expenditures take the form of monetary outlays and all firms have the same cost of capital then it is reasonable to think of firms marginal cost of influence as linear but if a firm has a reputational advantage and high costs of capital its lobbying technology may be more reasonably thought of as having convex costs relatively low marginal costs up to a moderate level of influence due to the reputational advantage and relatively high marginal costs at higher levels of influence due to the high costs of capital similarly the lobbying technology of a firm that is relatively unknown and has low costs of capital may be characterized by concave costs lobbying restrictions geographic location or preferential treatment by the policymaker further impact firms lobbying technologies inducing additional nonlinearities and asymmetries among firms in some lobbying settings firms also commit to expenditures conditional on a favorable outcome for example a firm may commit to building factories and creating new jobs if it is granted one of a limited number of manufacturing licenses thus the specification of firms lobbying technologies the type of asymmetries among firms the combination of unconditional and conditional investments and the number of eventual winners may change according to the lobbying setting studied the same is true for other competitions with an all pay feature in a competition for promotions workers often differ in their abilities experience and social skills more than one prize

household and industrial electricity demand in europe abstract this paper examines the electricity demand and its determinants in 29 european countries during the liberalization of the electricity market based on panel data for these countries for the years 1995 2015 and using a dynamic partial adjustment model price elasticities are estimated for both residential and industrial electricity demand these elasticities and effects of other variables on electricity consumption are estimated using both gmm generalized method of moments and ml maximum likelihood approaches it is found that the price elasticities are very small especially in the short run while the income elasticities are relatively large especially for households and in the long run

two stage rent seeking contests with carryovers we examine a two stage contest in which players in twogroups compete noncooperatively to win a rent in thefirst stage each group selects a finalist the twofinalists compete for the rent in the second stage first stage efforts are carried over to the secondstage in the sense that they are partly effective inthe second stage as well we show the following inthe case of player specific carryovers therent dissipation rate increases in the carryover rate with the carryover rate equal to one the rent isfully dissipated in the case of group specificcarryovers however the rent dissipation rate isindependent of the carryover rate

free entry and efficient rent seeking this paper concerns rent seeking and the extent to which rents are dissipated under various circumstances gordon tullock s 1967 insight that expenditures made to capture an artificially created transfer represent a social waste suggested that the cost to the economy of monopoly and regulation is greater than the simple harberger 1954 deadweight loss indeed under tullock s original formulation and in the extensions of his work by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 rents are exactly dissipated at the social level 1 is spent to capture 1 so that the total welfare loss from such activities is equal to the harberger triangle plus the rectangle of monopoly profits

dissipation of contestable rents by small numbers of contenders the theory of rent seeking with its origins in the observations of gordon tullock 1967 or to use jagdish bhagwati s 1982 proposed term the theory of directly unproductive profit seeking activities is concerned with the potentially adverse effects on resource allocation of incentives to cap ture and defend artificially contrived rents and transfers the scope for so cial loss proposed by the theory derives from the relation between the value of a contestable prize and the value of the resources attracted into the con test to determine the beneficiary of the prize underlying this social loss is a specification of how rational behavior by optimizing agents links the value of the prize sought to the resources expended it has been traditional to assume competitive behavior in describing the activities of lobbying and influence seeking then if some further condi tions are satisfied l the total value of the resources expended precisely equals the value of the prize sought so dissipation is complete 2 conse quently the social cost associated with contestability of a rent can be in ferred from the value of the rent itself and the detailed and hard to come by information on individual outlays made in the course of the contest be comes unnecessary by basing their analyses on competitive dissipation contributors to the rent seeking literature see the review by robert tollison 1982 have been able to presume that the observed value of a contested rent is an exact measure of the associated social cost of monopoly power or regu lation similarly in the trade theoretic literature where the rights contested are to quota premia or revenues from trade taxes krueger 1974 bhagwati

nationality preferences for labour in the international football industry this paper tests consumer and co worker nationalistic preferences by measuring the effect of team nationality composition on fan attendance and overall team quality using professional football teams in the world s five largest football leagues little evidence is found to support the hypothesis that fans or co workers discriminate based upon the player s nationality thus the under representation of various nationalities can be concluded to originate from a club s ownership and or management these results are similar to the racial bias revealed by english club owners as found by szymanski and preston

cognitive performance in competitive environments evidence from a natural experiment competitive situations that involve cognitive performance are widespread in labor markets schools and organizations including test taking competition for promotion in firms and others this paper studies cognitive performance in a high stakes competitive environment the analysis takes advantage of a natural experiment that randomly allocates different emotional states across professional subjects competing in a cognitive task the setting is a chess match where two players play an even number of chess games against each other alternating the color of the pieces white pieces confer an advantage for winning a chess game and who starts the match with these pieces is randomly decided the theoretical analysis shows that in this setting there is no rational reason why winning frequencies should be better than 50 50 in favor of the player drawing the white pieces in the first game yet we find that observed frequencies are about 60 40 differences in performance are also stronger when the competing subjects are more similar in cognitive skills we conclude that the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that psychological elements affect cognitive performance in the face of experience competition and high stakes

a market test for discrimination in the english professional soccer leagues this chapter proposes a market test for racial discrimination in salary setting in english league soccer over the period 1978 93 using a balanced panel of 39 clubs if there is a competitive market for the services of players the wage bill of the club will reflect their productivity and hence the performance of the club in the league discrimination can be said to exist if clubs fielding an above average proportion of black players systematically outperform clubs with a below average proportion of black players after one controls for the wage bill statistically significant evidence of discrimination in this sense is found

competition and gender prejudice are discriminatory employers doomed to fail according to becker s famous theory on discrimination gary becker 1957 the economics of discrimination university of chicago press entrepreneurs with a strong prejudice against female workers forgo profits by submitting to their tastes in a competitive market their firms lack efficiency and are therefore forced to leave we present new empirical evidence for this prediction by studying the survival of start up firms in longitudinal matched employer employee data we find that firms with strong preferences for discrimination approximated by a low share of female employees relative to the industry average have significantly shorter survival rates this is especially relevant for firms starting out with female shares in the lower tail of the distribution competition at the industry level additionally reduces firm survival and accelerates the rate at which prejudiced firms are weeded out we also find evidence for employer learning as highly discriminatory start up firms that manage to survive submit to market powers and increase their female workforce over time

transfer seeking and avoidance on the full social costs of rent seeking we would like to thank gordon tullock and an anonymous referee of this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

multiple prize contests the optimal allocation of prizes abstract multiple prize contests are important in various fields of economics ranging from rent seeking over labour economics patent and r d races to tendering for governmental projects hence it is crucial to understand the incentive effects of multiple prizes on effort investment this survey attempts to outline compare and evaluate the results from the literature while a first prize always results in a positive incentive to invest effort second and later prizes lead to ambiguous effects depending on the objective function the characteristics of the individuals and the type of contest a different prize allocation is optimal

the assessment the economics of sport the study of sports economics has expanded rapidly in recent years in response to significantly increased demand for sport itself for economic analysis relevant to commercial litigation in sport for lively teaching material in schools and universities and for research into the incentive properties of sporting contests while much of the literature has focused on the issue of competitive balance and how to achieve it there have still been relatively few studies that apply the lessons of the economic theory of contests to the analysis of sports there remain huge opportunities both to develop our theoretical understanding of incentive mechanisms in sport and to conduct empirical research in the operation of incentives in sporting contests copyright 2003 oxford university press

team performance and race evidence from the english and french national soccer teams this study examines the performance of the men s senior national soccer teams of england and france between the years 1996 and 2011 the paper models team performance using an array of match specific variables including the racial composition of the starting eleven we find no definitive evidence that the racial composition of the national teams exerts an influence on match outcome for either country over the period reviewed in addition while there is no statistical support for the view that the identity of the england national team manager is an important determinant of performance there is mild evidence that the converse is the case for france

the evolution of sharing rules in rent seeking contests incentives crowd out cooperation modern societies are characterized by competing organizations that rely predominantly on incentive schemes to align the behavior of their members with the organizations objectives this study contributes to explaining why in so many cases incentive schemes have gradually crowded out cooperation as an organization device our explanation does not draw on free riding the obvious achilles heel of cooperation but relies completely on fundamental group contest mechanisms by investigating a canonical rent seeking model and adopting an evolutionary perspective the analysis identifies shortcomings in previous results sets the record straight and explains why the process of incentivizing organizations is protracted

seeking rents by setting rents the political economy of rent seeking in recent years there has been a large number of papers on the subject of rent seeking most such works on rent seeking have taken the rent as exogenously determined by regulators regulators howeve r may also be expected and indeed have been shown to be rent seeke rs and hence the determination of the rent itself should be endogeniz ed to reflect the fact that the rent setters are themselves rent se ekers in this paper the authors do this by presenting an analysis o f the interaction of regulators firms and consumers within a rent s eeking framework where all three groups are assumed to be self motiva ted the analysis is carried out under alternative assumptions regard ing the nature of the market and the reaction functions of the partic ipants policy implications are drawn where appropriate copyright 1987 by royal economic society

collective rent dissipation the theory of rent seeking was initiated by tullock 1967 1980 followed by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 and more recently extended in various directions by allard 1988 appelbaum and katz 1986a b c gradstein and nitzan 1989 hillman and katz 1984 1987 hillman and samet 1987 hillman and riley 1989 katz et al 1990 long and vousden 1987 ursprung 1990 and varian 1989 the purpose of this paper is to extend this theory by introducing the possibility of collective group rent seeking with voluntary individual decisions regarding their extent of participation in the collective rent seeking efforts

the effects of coworker heterogeneity on firm level output assessing the impacts of cultural and language diversity in the national hockey league this paper uses data from the national hockey league nhl to consider the potential gains to firms from employing culturally diverse work teams it finds that the presence of foreign workers does increase firm level performance nhl teams that employed a higher proportion of european players performed better however the results also indicate that teams perform better when their european players come from the same country rather than being spread across many european countries when teams have players from a wide array of european countries integration costs associated with language and cultural differences may start to over ride any gains from diversity

risk averse rent seeking with shared rents this paper presents a nash equilibrium model of rent seeking behavior in which risk averse players expend resources to obtain a share of a rent as for example in contests for import quota licences results are obtained relating the equilibrium level of lobbying effort by each player to the value of the rent in particular reduced individual lobbying effort is associated with higher rents contested if players are sufficiently risk averse the question of whether the value of rents is a good measure of the resource cost of rent seeking is also considered a simple approximation involving risk and risk aversion parameters is derived for the proportion of rents dissipated in long run equilibrium risk and risk aversion are seen to reduce the rent dissipation ratio below unity copyright 1987 by royal economic society

participation in deterministic contests abstract this paper considers participation in deterministic contests for m 1 identical prizes which employ an auction like rule to determine the winners in most papers that investigate such models participation by precisely m 1 players is associated with players having complete information about their opponents characteristics and participation by more than m 1 players is associated with players having incomplete information about their opponents characteristics i show that incomplete information is in fact neither sufficient nor necessary for participation by more than m 1 players

economic analysis of the profitability of existing wind parks in portugal abstract discussions on the appropriate policy design and level of incentive to promote renewable energy adoption and meet the 20 20 20 goals have spurred recently in the european union these discussions are also ongoing in portugal namely in what concerns the level and duration of feed in tariffs that should be provided to independent power producers this in turn raises the question of whether the past feed in tariff levels were well designed to achieve the goals of a larger penetration of renewables in the portuguese grid the policies to induce wind adoption have led to a growth in wind installed capacity and share of electricity generated by wind in portugal but questions arise on their cost effectiveness and whether alternative policy designs would have led to the same goal in this work we estimate profits made by wind independent power producers for wind parks that were connected in portugal between 1992 and 2010 and conclude that the feed in tariffs have overcompensated some wind power producers we also discuss the recent changes in feed in tariff legislation published in february 2013 and estimate the expected costs of the introduced changes

classroom games rent seeking and the inefficiency of non market allocations economics is often taught at a level of abstraction that can hinder some students from gaining basic intuition however lecture and textbook presentations can be complemented with classroom exercises in which students make decisions and interact the approach can increase interest in and decrease skepticism about economic theory this feature offers short descriptions of classroom exercises for a variety of economics courses with something of an emphasis on the more popular undergraduate courses suggestions for future columns and comments on past ones should be sent to charles holt c o journal of economic perspectives department of economics university of virginia charlottesville virginia 22903 3288

tullock s rent seeking contest with a minimum expenditure requirement vol 93 pg 477 1997 we consider a rent seeking contest of the kind introduced by tullock 1980 in which two players compete for a monopoly rent we extend the contest by requiring that if a player puts forward an effort his expenditures must be larger than or equal to some minimum level we show that depending on the model parameters the number of nash equilibria of the extended model can be zero one two or four furthermore it turns out that the extent of rent dissipation in a nash equilibrium of the extended model can be larger than equal to or smaller than the extent of rent dissipation in the unique nash equilibrium of the original model

would you trust lobbies we consider the regulatory problem to approve or to ban a new product technology in the context of scientific controversy about its detrimental environmental and or health effects we formalize the regulator s decision making process as a tullock contest towards a theory of the rent seeking society texas a m university press texas 1980 the contestants being an industrial lobby representing the economic agents who have developed the new product technology and an environmental lobby representing the economic agents who will be harmed by the product or technology assuming that the industrial lobby has private information about the unfavorable environmental and or health effects but can be held liable for damage ex post we derive the equilibrium properties of the contest in particular we derive conditions under which it is socially preferable for the regulator to decide according to the contest s outcome rather than according to an ex ante cost benefit analysis using his prior beliefs we find that the contest outperforms the ex ante cost benefit analysis only if the risk of judgment proofness is not too high

leadership and expenditures in rent seeking models the theory of rent seeking begun by tullock 1967 krueger 1974 and posner 1975 is now well established the analysis of these models typically involves studying properties of the symmetric noncooperative nash equilibrium defined in terms of pure strategies rent seeking expenditures in a 1980 article tullock first noted and in 1984 later elaborated upon several situations where the traditional nash equilibrium of equal rent seeking payments by identical players failed to exist this failure could arise for two reasons first even though the second order conditions were satisfied at the candidate symmetric equilibrium point 2 once at that point all agents had a conditional incentive to choose zero rent seeking to avoid negative payoffs thus the traditional point while locally optimal as indicated by the second order conditions was not globally optimal the second possible reason for failure was that at the traditional point the second order conditions were violated the problems arise because r a parameter affecting the conditional probability of successful rent seeking may be too large the principal consequence is that the traditional model with myopic agents does not capture some of the potential behaviour of the players a particularly worrisome feature is that agents may find it privately optimal to spend in total more on rentseeking than the value of the prize as well benefits sometimes accrue to agents if they can block entry by preemptive play tullock 1984 97 has conjectured that there is another game in the precommitment stage in which the parties attempt to make the first commitment so that no one else will enter in this paper we consider a two player noncooperative rent seeking game where agents are allowed to adopt and potentially benefit from other than a passive stance towards their rivals firms must choose to be either leaders or followers and consistent with that decision and their beliefs about their rivals strategies then choose their rent seeking expenditures firms thus have the option of becoming stakelberg leaders or stakelberg followers 3 the analysis begins insection 2 we provide three principal results that serve to characterize the range of possible equilibria the results critically depend

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

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

all pay auctions with a buy price option all pay auctions this paper studies all pay auctions in which there is a buy price option for bidders to guarantee purchases at a seller specified price we analyze symmetric increasing bidding equilibria in the first and second price all pay auctions with the buy price option while the optimal buy price in the second price is higher than are those in the first price all pay auction both formats maintain the same expected profit with an endogenous entry process all pay auctions with the buy price can attract more consumers and ultimately reach a higher expected profit than does the uniform posted price selling mechanism jel d44 l11 l81

long run equilibrium and total expenditures in rent seeking a comment although corcoran is mathematically correct i believe his comment is not very helpful in order to discuss the matter in some detail the reader should consult table 7 1 from my original efficient rent seeking reproduced on page 92 1 this shows the equilibrium investment of each individual different numbers of individuals playing the game n and differing values of r table 7 2 also reproduced on page 93 shows the total investment

multi stage sequential all pay auctions abstract we study multi stage sequential all pay contests auctions where heterogeneous contestants are privately informed about a parameter ability that affects their cost of effort we characterize the perfect bayesian equilibrium of these contests and analyze the effect of the number of contestants and their types on the contestants expected highest effort

efficient rents 1 rent seeking behavior in the long run we have analyzed long run behavior in rent seeking under several conditions and behavioral hypotheses the question of interest is whether or not the long run expenditures will exactly equal the value of the rents our results depend on the type of competitive response which is assumed to exist in the long run and on the r value governing the probability of winning

an empirical analysis of the fiscal incidence of renewable energy support in the european union abstract in liberalised energy markets electricity from renewable energy re using solar pv and wind turbines requires financial support because the expected number of generation hours is insufficient to induce private investment such support has a direct cost from the additional expenditure over what would have been incurred had fossil fuel generation been used and indirect costs arising from the random and distributed nature of the re output comparing european union countries between 2007 and 2017 we find the pricing structure of retail electricity is regressive and correlated to reliance upon re although initially the direct and indirect costs of re affects integrated utilities and aggregators the ultimate burden largely falls upon lower income cohorts given policy objectives for re these finding are worrisome though as a society we may benefit from reducing dependence upon fossil fuels the burden of this transition falls upon those with the lowest income raising questions over fairness explaining the reasons for fiscal regressiveness leads to suggestions on how it may be redressed

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

long run equilibrium and total expenditures in rent seeking the lure of excess profits or rents associated with monopoly power gives rise to expenditures to obtain these rents competitive rent seeking behavior is recognized as a factor which must be included among the wastes associated with monopoly power tullock 1967 posner 1975 1 the expenditures are aimed at transferring wealth rather than its creation and the use of resources to obtain this transfer is a loss to society how important rent seeking is as a part of the total monopolistic waste hinges on the size of the total expenditures induced by a given level of excess profits

rent seeking with non identical sharing rules the primary object of this paper is to examine the role of differential sharing rules within a collective rent seeking setting on the possible non existence of nash equilibrium focusing on groups that distribute part of the rent equally among their members and the residual according to relative effort we show that in rent seeking societies applying the two polar sharing rules equilibrium never exists in the general case where groups apply different but not necessarily the polar sharing rules we study the relationship between group variability in distributing rents and the problem of non existence of equilibrium in the rent seeking game

coasean bargaining in the presence of pigouvian taxation coasean arguments against the pigouvian perspective are well established a central tenet in this criticism argues that a pigouvian tax may be a source of inefficiency if parties were to bargain in the presence of a pigouvian tax allocative inefficiencies would occur the so called buchanan stubblebine turvey theorem by analyzing a coasean environment where the appropriation of property rights is costly we show coasean bargaining in the presence of a pre existing pigouvian tax may be superior this has implications for policy where dual regulatory environments exist such as regulation at the state and federal level as well as environmental liability and litigation

the thrill of victory the agony of defeat this paper presents experimental evidence from a rent seeking exercise where the highest bidder wins the rent but all bidders including the winner lose their wagers this exercise closely resembles the rent seeking dilemma facing agents in many settings there are two main conclusions from the results first there is a tendency towards overdissipation of the rent second some individuals are willing to pay more for a rent than its face value would warrant we attribute this phenomenon to a thrill of victory effect

to fight or not to fight an analysis of submission struggle and the design of contests this paper considers the players behaviour in an asymmetric two player contest when do they decide to struggle and when to subjugate analysing contest success functions it is found that two crucial prerequisites for struggle or war have to be met thus such an equilibrium is possible but restrictive if a self interested rule setter chooses the contest success function endogenously we show that one player will always subjugate applications to rent seeking and environmental regulation are discussed

the welfare consequences of directly unproductive profit seeking dup lobbying activities price versus quantity distortions abstract this paper is a contribution to the growing literature on the theory of what bhagwati 1982 has christened the theory of dup activities these are activities that use up real resources in making profits i e income without producing directly or indirectly a good they result therefore in the contraction of the availability set defined on goods for one generic subset of such dup activities namely distortion triggered lobbying activities the paper establishes asymmetrical propositions on the possibility of such dup lobbying resulting in a paradoxical improvement of welfare

gambling in contests with heterogeneous loss constraints i study the impact of asymmetric loss constraints on risk taking behavior in the contest model of seel and strack 2013 i derive the unique nash equilibrium outcome the equilibrium payoffs and comparative statics about the bankruptcy risk

estimation of elasticity price of electricity with incomplete information abstract the sharp increase in energy prices and growing concern for environmental issues among other things are behind the renewed interest in energy demand estimation however there is scarce academic literature that takes real situation of energy suppliers into account high quality but incomplete data in this paper we propose a useful and rather simple instrument for estimating electricity demand with the incomplete and or imperfect data currently available to suppliers in particular using real expenditure and consumption data on electricity we employ a model of random effects for panel data to estimate residential and industrial electricity demand in spain

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

risk aversion and rent seeking an extension and some experimental evidence theoretical investigations indicate that the risk attitudes of individuals will effect the amount of rent that can be assumed to be dissipated by rent seeking activities following this line of investigation we extend hillman and katz s work to a small numbers case and demonstrate that the degree to which a monopoly rent is dissipated is dependent upon the structure of the risk attitudes of two risk averse individuals

women and power unpopular unwilling or held back we use spain s equality law to test for the existence of agency problems between party leaders and their constituents the law mandates a 40 percent female quota on electoral lists in towns with populations above 5 000 using pre and postquota data by party and municipality we implement a triple difference design we find that female quotas resulted in slightly better electoral results for the parties that were most affected by the quota our evidence shows that party leaders were not maximizing electoral results prior to the quota suggesting the existence of agency problems that hinder female representation in political institutions

bidding for a group specific public good prize abstract we examine the equilibrium effort levels of individual players and groups in a contest in which two groups compete with each other to win a group specific public good prize the players choose their effort levels simultaneously and independently and the winning group is determined by the selection rule of all pay auctions we first prove nonexistence of a pure strategy nash equilibrium and then construct a mixed strategy nash equilibrium at the nash equilibrium the only active player in each group is a player whose valuation for the prize is the highest in that group all the other players expend zero effort and the equilibrium effort levels depend solely on two values the highest valuation for the prize in each group

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

gambling in contests this paper presents a strategic model of risk taking behavior in contests formally we analyze an n player winner take all contest in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed brownian motion with drift a player whose process reaches zero has to stop the player with the highest stopping point wins unlike the explicit cost for a higher stopping time in a war of attrition here higher stopping times are riskier because players can go bankrupt we derive a closed form solution of a nash equilibrium outcome in equilibrium highest expected losses occur at an intermediate negative value of the drift

a unified theory of capital and labor markets in major league baseball the economics of professional sports has been relegated to the realm of labor theory by the assumption that owners of sports franchises are simply maximizers of profit in vacuo theory developed within this vacuum 11 12 15 16 18 19 has been preoccupied with rottenburg s invariance proposition 13 that the distribution of talent within major league baseball mlb is independent of the legal ownership of that talent according to this coasian argument the institution of free agency in mlb would not affect the real decisions of teams but it would result in the transfer of wealth from owners to players in the form of higher player salaries reduced exploitation diminished profits and lower franchise values as predicted the player cost share of league revenues rose from 20 percent to 58 percent over the first two decades of free agency in mlb unfortunately the explosion in mlb players salaries has been attributed by association to the institution of free agency itself 1 symptom treating policies such as payroll caps and luxury taxes which have been conceived from this myopic view have been ineffective 12 and potentially deleterious 18 during the same two decades however over 40 mlb franchise ownerships were coincidentally transferred amid a revolutionary transition of mlb ownership structure from sole sportsman to leveraged syndicate 2 this paper explores the possibility that the salary escalation during the free agency period was partially the result of the capital market game of leveraged syndication being actively played on a labor market field of free agency the major problem in developing a theory to unify capital and labor market behavior stems from modigliani and miller s irrelevance proposition 10 that the financial and real decisions of a firm

all pay auctions with certain and uncertain prizes abstract we study all pay auctions with multiple prizes the players have the same value for all the certain prizes except for one uncertain prize for which each player has a private value we characterize the equilibrium strategy and show that independent of the ranking of the uncertain prize if the uncertain prize is not the lowest one a player s effort as well as his expected payoff increase in his value for the uncertain prize otherwise if this prize is the lowest one we obtain that a player s effort may decrease in his value for the uncertain prize but his expected utility increases

complete rent dissipation when the number of rent seekers is uncertain the focal question in the theory of rent seeking is the extent of rent dissipation as the indicator of social loss in general rent seeking models assume that the number of contenders in a rent seeking contest is known with certainty but given the hidden nature of rent seeking participants in rent seeking more usually can be expected to face an uncertain number of rivals we show that in a tullock contest with a stochastic number of participants complete ex ante rent dissipation is consistent with a pure strategy nash equilibrium this contrasts with but complements previous results of under dissipation when the number of rent seekers is uncertain our complete dissipation result expands the range of circumstances consistent with association of an observed rent with social loss

public policies pressure groups and dead weight costs abstract this paper presents a model of competition among special interest groups for political influence each active group exerts pressure to affect its taxes and subsidies where activities of different groups are related by the equality between total tax collections and total tax subsidies the dead weight costs and benefits of taxes and subsidies play a major role in our model an increase in the dead weight cost of taxation encourages pressure by taxpayers while an increase in the dead weight costs of subsidies discourages pressure by recipients various applications of the analysis are discussed