A multi-winner nested rent-seeking contest推荐.pdfVIP

Public Choice 87: 177-184, 1996. © 1996KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. A m u l t i - w i n n e r n e s t e d r e n t - s e e k i n g c o n t e s t * DEREK J. CLARK 1 CHRISTIAN RIIS 2 * 1Department of Economics NFH, University of Troms¢, 9037 Troms¢, Norway; 2Foundation for Research in Economics and Business Administration (SNF) Gaustadalln 21, 0371 Oslo, Norway Accepted 30 August 1995 Abstract. This paper considers a symmetric imperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contest in which there may be several winners. We first demonstrate a serious flaw in previous work and then go on to suggest an alternative method for analyzing the contest. In contrast to the previous work, we show that the value of the rent is fully dissipated in equilibrium as the number of players becomes large. 1. I n t r o d u c t i o n The bulk of the literature on imperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contests has concentrated on the case in which a number of contestants compete to win a single prize. 1 An exception is the paper by Berry (1993) in which there are several identical prizes on offer, and each player may win no more than one prize. 2 In a completely symmetric model, Berry shows that the amount of rent-seeking which arises in the symmetric equilibrium with a large number of contestants is only a fraction of the value of the total rent. This is in stark contrast to the one prize case in which a large number of identical contestants fully dissipate the value of the rent. Thus, introducing this multi-prize framework seems to resolve Tullocks (1988) conundrum that theoretical models predict much more rent-seeking than is ob