We show that rent-seeking contests with shortlisting have comparative static properties that depend on the stage of the contest. By generalising the argument in Amegashie (1997), we show that well-known comparative static results in single-stage rent-seeking contests do not necessarily carry...

Congleton (1984) shows that a rent awarded by a committee results in smaller aggregate rent-seeking expenditures than a similar rent awarded by a single administrator. This note modifies Congleton's model by considering a model in which voting is probabilistic instead of deterministic. I show...

There is very little work on the equilibrium of the all-pay auction when the prize is awarded by two or more people. I consider an all-pay auction under committee administration with caps on the bids of the contestants. I show that for any number of committee members and contestants, there...

Consider a seller and a buyer bargaining over the price of an agricultural product in a developing economy. Think of the following common bargaining deal: the seller tries to persuade the buyer to accept a higher price and, in return, give the buyer a deal (i.e., extra units of the product for...