A simple auction-theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown by the court. The court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party, and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case....

In G. Tullock's rent-seeking model, the probability that a player wins the game depends on expenditures raised to the power R. The authors show that a symmetric mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium exists when R "is greater than" 2, and that overdissipation of rents does not arise in any Nash...

Gordon Tullock's analysis of rent seeking and overdissipation is reconsidered. The authors show that, while equilibrium strategies do not permit overdissipation in expectation, for particular realizations of players' mixed strategies the total amount spent competing for rents can exceed the...