Motivated by the observed relevance of institutional quality, such as strong property rights, for economic performance, this research considers the emergence of property rights protection as a political outcome. It argues that the support for such protection is greater the more equal income...

In this short paper I adopt the public choice school paradigm of modeling a government in order to compare its performance with that of the market in the standard model of the provision of public goods. Private provision is represented by the Cournot-Nash equilibrium in individual contributions....

A government may adopt extreme policies (policies lying outside the interval between the ideal points of the political parties) for electoral purposes. It can benefit when a change in policy is costly and when the opposing party cannot commit to maintaining the status quo.

Contests have different, sometimes quite complex, organisational structures. In particular, while most of the existing literature focuses on simultaneous contests, multistage contests are also quite frequently encountered. This paper seeks to provide a rationale for the latter by endogenising...

This study shows that distortion of probabilities is a possible reason for rent under-dissipation in contests with relatively small number of participants. Such distortion may also result, however, in over-dissipation of the contested rent. Focusing on contests with homogeneous contestants and...

Membership in the authors' labor-managed firm is determined in the long run by expected income maximization. In the short run, upon the realization of output price, each member may leave the labor-managed firm. However, a decision to leave when the entire membership quits is associated with...

This paper generalizes the widely studied individual rent-seeking model by introducing the possibility of collective rent seeking; n interest groups compete over a fixed rent and individual group members decide voluntarily on the extent of participation in their group rent-seeking activities....