We investigate observed rent dissipation—the ratio of the total costs seeking to monetary value rent—in winner-take-all and share contests, where preferences are more general than usually assumed in literature. With concave valuation rent, we find that contests can exhibit over-dissipation if contested is below a threshold yet under-dissipation with large rents: nature implies contestants relat...

How is corruption organized? Studies of corrupt behavior to date shed light on both the causes and consequences of corruption. Yet we have little understanding of how corrupt activities are structured and the ways in which rents are, or are not, distributed across various actors—insights that would, in theory, prove enlightening for efforts to reduce corruption. In this paper, I analyze the org...