We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

We examine who benefits when there is a strong leader in place, and those who benefit when a situation lacks a proper leader. There are fractious terrorist groups who seek to serve the same people in common cause against a common enemy. The groups compete for rents obtained from the public by...

I propose a simple contest success function which relaxes two features of the Tullock probability function. I show that this contest success function could be used to obtain interesting results and is more tractable than Tullock's function in certain cases. In particular, researchers who are...

This paper presents an axiomatic characterization of difference-form group contests, that is, contests fought among groups and where their probability of victory depends on the difference of their effective efforts. This axiomatization rests on the property of Absolute Consistency, stating that...

Rent seeking contest shapes the risk preference of the contestants. It instills in the weaker contestant who has little to lose and much to gain a preference for risk taking, and the weaker the contestant, the stronger the instilled preference for risk taking. On the other hand, it causes the...

We examine the effect of the interaction between resource rents and democracy on corruption for a panel of 29 Sub-Saharan countries during the period from 1985 to 2007. We find that higher resource rents lead to more corruption and that the effect is significantly stronger in less democratic...

We consider rent-seeking contests between and within two equal-sized groups. Each group adopts one of three sequences: first internal then external contest, first external then internal contest, and simultaneous internal and external contests. Groups cannot unilaterally postpone a contest...

We examine the effect of the interaction between resource rents and democracy on corruption for a panel of 29 Sub-Saharan countries during the period from 1985 to 2007. We find that higher resource rents lead to more corruption and that the effect is significantly stronger in less democratic...