POLITICALLY CONTESTABLE RENTS AND TRANSFERS

Dissipation of contestable rents by small numbers of contenders

The theory of rent seeking with its origins in the observations of Gordon Tullock (1967) or to use Jagdish Bhagwati's (1982) proposed term, the theory of directly unproductive profit-seeking activities is concerned with the potentially adverse effects on resource allocation of incentives to capture and defend artificially-contrived rents and transfers. The scope for social loss proposed by the ...

Productive Efficiency and Contestable Markets

This paper provides a new game theoretic model consistent with the premises of contestable markets. Two firms repeatedly compete for a natural monopoly position. The limit price of the incumbent is disciplined by a hit and run strategy of the entrant. In this model, contrarily to the well known Maskin and Tirole model (1988): i) productive efficiency is encouraged, the more efficient firm gets ...

Deregulation and the Theory of Contestable Markets

Politically Correct Information Adoption

This paper analyses the case when the political struggle not is channeled through policy choices, but through what information to adopt. The paper presents a simple model to analyze collective decisions of adopting new information when different parties' payoffs are contingent upon the new information. In equilibrium we demonstrate that the adopted information is biased towards “political corre...

Land Rents

We study the technological pre-conditions for competitive equilibrium in a multisectoral economy where“land” is an essential imput. Earlier results by Bidard and Salvadori require either very low interest rates or are unable to predict the type of final demand vectors that can be supported by an equilibrium. We extend these earlier results and show that a given level and structure of final dema...