We analyze a model of bargaining over new ideas. The model accounts for the problem of information leakage, i.e., the diffusion of information about the idea before and after the idea is implemented. We analyze the effects of information leakage on the distribution of rents within firms and the firms’ stability to the introduction of innovation. In the model, the distribution of rents in a firm...

We present a new bilateral agent-based land market model, which moves beyond previous work by explicitly modeling behavioral drivers of land-market transactions on both the buyer and seller sides; formation of bid prices (of buyers) and ask prices (of sellers); and the relative division of the gains from trade from the market transactions. We analyze model output using a series of macro-scale e...

In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians’ behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We derive a number of interesting results: i) Political competition is a necessary but not a sufficient c...

We investigate policy reform in a model in which there are both rent seeking and lobbying activities. These two activities involve similar skills, so a reform which reduces rents will cause a shift into lobbying. Also, lobbying is subject to a free-rider problem, so the marginal return to the industry from lobbying may greatly exceed an individual firm’s return to lobbying. Thus, the shift into...

The standard revenue-maximizing auction discriminates against a priori stronger bidders so as to reduce their information rents. We show that such discrimination is no longer optimal when the auction’s winner may resell to another bidder, and the auctioneer has non-Bayesian uncertainty about such resale opportunities (including possible leakage of private information before resale). We consider...

This paper develops a theory of outsourcing in which the circumstances under which factors of production can grab rents play the leading role. One factor has monopoly power (call this labor) while a second factor does not (call this capital). There are two kinds of production tasks: labor-intensive and capital-intensive. We show that if frictions limiting outsourcing are not too large, in equil...

Corruption by the politically connected is often blamed for economic ills, particularly in less developed economies. Using a loan-level data set of more than 90,000 …rms that represents the universe of corporate lending in Pakistan between 1996 and 2002, we investigate rents to politically connected …rms in banking. Classifying a …rm as “political”if its director participates in an election, we...