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...

We investigate policy reform in a model with both lobbying, which involves a free-rider problem, and ordinary rent seeking, which does not. These activities involve similar skills, so a reform which reduces rents shifts labor into lobbying. Also, because of the free-rider problem, the marginal...

In a standard rent-seeking contest, players optimally employ resources in an attempt to obtain the rent. Typically, it is assumed that these resources may be hired at any desired level at some exogenous per-unit cost. In practice, these resources often consist of scarce, talented individuals. We...

Congress approved the superconducting supercollider (SSC), but later cut all funding after construction for the project had begun. We claim that this reversal was due, in part, to a problem of time inconsistency. Representatives from states in contention to receive the project had an incentive...

Pecorino (1998) models tariff lobbying in a repeated game and finds that cooperation can be maintained in a large group, even though tariff lobbying provides a rival public good to interest group members. We add small fixed costs of participation to this model and find that cooperation must...

As pointed out by Krueger (1993a, 1993b), changes in policy which are exogenous to the lobbying process may lead to a vicious cycle of protectionism. A sector which receives protection will tend to grow, thereby increasing the constituency for greater protection and reducing the constituency...

It has been shown that states with higher per capita senate representation have higher federal spending per capita (Atlas, C. M., Gilligan, T. A., Hendershott, R. J. and Zupan, M. A. (1995). American Economic Review 85: 624–629). With a more recent data sample, more highly disaggregated data...

The effect of changes in industry structure on the ability to maintain a cooperative level of tariff lobbying are analyzed in a repeated game setting in which a simple trigger strategy is the enforcement mechanism. The difficulty of maintaining cooperation is identified with the minimum discount...