We examine how inequality in the endowment of secure wealth, mediated through voluntary public good provision, affects rent-seeking within and between groups. We model a scenario where two communities, each internally differentiated into rich, intermediate and poor segments, contest one another...

We examine how inequality in the endowment of secure wealth, mediated through voluntary public communities, each internally differentiated into rich, intermediate and poor segments, contest one another for the division of some rent. Any rent accruing to a community is distributed internally...

We examine how group-specific differences in reservation wage, arising due to asymmetries in social entitlements, impact distribution via the joint determination of class conflict between workers and employers, and 'ethnic' conflict among workers. We model a two-dimensional contest, where two...

Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one’s wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption....

We present a general revealed preference theorem concerning stochastic choice behavior by consumers. We show that, when the consumer spends her entire wealth, the Weak Axiom of Stochastic Revealed Preference due to Bandyopadhyay, Dasgupta, and Pattanaik (1999) is equivalent to a restriction on...

We examine how group-specific differences in reservation wage, arising due to asymmetries in social entitlements, impact on distribution via the joint determination of class conflict between workers and employers, and ‘ethnic’ conflict among workers. We model a two-dimensional contest, where...

Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is commonly perceived as legitimizing one’s wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditures. We examine the logic of this exemption....

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

We model a general choice environment via probabilistic choice correspondences, with (possibly) incomplete domain and infinite universal set of alternatives. We offer a consistency restriction regarding choice when the feasible set contracts. This condition, ‘contraction consistency’,...