In this paper we advocate a new initial allocation mechanism for a tradable pollution permit market. We outline a Permit Allocation Contest (PAC) that distributes permits to firms based on their rank relative to other firms. This ranking is achieved by ordering firms based on an observable...

We investigate observed rent dissipation-the ratio of the total costs of rent seeking to the monetary value of the rent-in winner-take-all and share contests, where preferences are more general than usually assumed in the literature. With concave valuation of the rent, we find that contests can...