The last survey of the rent-seeking literature took place more than a decade ago. Since that time a great deal of new research has been published in a wide variety of journals, covering a wide variety of topics. The scope of that research is such that very few researchers will be familiar with more than a small part of contemporary research, and very few libraries will be able to provide access to the full breadth of that research. This two-volume collection provides an extensive overview of 40 years of rent-seeking research. The volumes include the foundational papers, many of which have not been in print for two decades. They include recent game-theoretic analyses of rent-seeking contests and also appHcations of the rent-seeking concepts and methodology to economic regulation, international trade policy, economic history, poUtical com­ petition, and other social phenomena. The new collection is more than twice as large as any previous collection and both updates and extends the earlier surveys. Volume I contains previously published research on the theory of rent-seeking contests, which is an important strand of contemporary game theory. Volume II contains previously pubHshed research that uses the theory of rent-seeking to an­ alyze a broad range of public policy and social science topics. The editors spent more than a year assembling possible papers and, although the selections fill two large volumes, many more papers could have been included.

Title is also available as part of a set: 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking (978-3-540-79188-1)

Forty Years of Research on Rent Seeking: An Overview.- Forty Years of Research on Rent Seeking: An Overview.- Rents.- The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft.- Rent Seeking and Profit Seeking.- Competitive Process, Competitive Waste, and Institutions.- Risk-Averse Rent Seekers and The Social Cost of Monopoly Power.- Efficient Rent Seeking.- Free entry and efficient rent seeking.- A general analysis of rent-seeking games.- Rent-seeking with asymmetric valuations.- Dissipation of contestable rents by small numbers of contenders.- Politically Contestable Rents and Transfers.- The all-pay auction with complete information.- Rent Seeking with Bounded Rationality: An Analysis of the All-Pay Auction.- Conflict and rent-seeking success functions: Ratio vs. difference models of relative success.- Contest success functions.- On the Existence and Uniqueness of Pure Nash Equilibrium in Rent-Seeking Games.- Collective Dimensions.- Commitees and rent-seeking effort.- Risk-averse rent seeking with shared rents.- Collective Rent Dissipation.- The equivalence of rent-seeking outcomes for competitive-share and strategic groups.- Public Goods, Rent Dissipation, And Candidate Competition.- Effort levels in contests.- Rent Seeking and The Provision of Public Goods.- A general model of rent seeking for public goods.- Collective Action and the Group Size Paradox.- Extensions.- Transfer seeking and avoidance: On the full social costs of rent seeking.- Strategic Buyers and the Social Cost of Monopoly.- Sabotage in Rent-Seeking Contests.- Strategic restraint in contests.- Strategic Behavior in Contests.- Strategic Behavior in Contests: Comment.- The Social Cost of Rent Seeking When Victories are Potentially Transient and Losses Final.- Uncertain preassigned non-contestable and contestable rents.- Evolutionary equilibrium in Tullock contests: spite and overdissipation.- Information in conflicts.- Rent seeking with private values.- Structure of Contests.- Hierarchical Structure and The Social Costs of Bribes and Transfers.- Group competition for rents.- Bidding in hierarchies.- Seeking Rents by Setting Rents: The Political Economy of Rent Seeking.- Orchestrating Rent Seeking Contests.- Maximum efforts in contests with asymmetric valuations.- Optimal Contests.- Competition over More Than One Prize.- The Optimal Allocation of Prizes in Contests.- Incentive effects of second prizes.- Experiments.- Reexamining efficient rent-seeking in laboratory markets.- An experimental examination of rational rent-seeking.- Efficient rent-seeking in experiment.