Donor aid organizations (DAOs) are multi-layered and multi-dimensional bureaucracies with many departments trying to find solutions to problems for countries, investing staff resources and effort into having an effect. A department may come into conflict with other departments because of...

The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which specifies the winning probabilities of agents. We provide an axiomatization of two parametric families of CSF's. In the first, the winning probability of each agent depends on the investments and a vector of...

We build a tractable stylized model of external sovereign debt and endogenous international interest rates. In corrupt economies with rent-seeking groups stealing public resources, a politico-economic equilibrium is characterized by permanent fiscal impatience which leads to excessive issuing of...

I present a study of ownership of firms under government rent seeking. Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such a government rent seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership is shown...

Empirical studies have shown that preferences for redistribution are significantly correlated with expectations of future mobility and the belief that society offers equal opportunities. We add to previous research by investigating the role of individual and social norms on rent seeking. We find...

Fundamentalist organizations and the terrorists they spawn do not arise of a vacuum. Combating terrorism requires understanding the principles of groups’ formation, development and growth. We use economic theory to explain the creation and development of fundamentalist groups. In this paper we...

The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which specifiesthe winning probabilities of agents. The existing axiomatizations of CSFs assume thatcontestants can make only one type of investment. This paper generalizes these axiomatizationsto the case where each...

We show that the presence of loss aversion on the part of participantsin a Tullock imperfectly discriminating contest will significantlyreduce the proportion of the rent dissipated in the form of resourcesused up in the competition for that rent...

This paper considers the extent to which expenditure by contestants inimperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contests dissipates all or only partof the rent. In particular, we investigate strategic effects, technologicaleffects and asymmetry under an assumption of diminishing returns to...

We investigate the Nash equilibria of asymmetric, winner-take-all, imperfectlydiscriminating contests, focussing on existence, uniqueness and rentdissipation. When the contest success function is determined by a productionfunction with decreasing returns for each contestant, equilibria...