Cross-shareholdings and competition in a rent-seeking contest

Pim Heijnen and Lambert Schoonbeek

International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2020, vol. 71, issue C

Abstract: We consider a Tullock rent-seeking contest with two firms and two investors. Each investor owns a majority share in one firm and a silent minority cross-shareholding in the other firm. We measure competition by either firms’ aggregate efforts or rent dissipation. We show that aggregate efforts are smaller in our contest than in the benchmark case without cross-shareholdings. Next, we provide the necessary and sufficient conditions such that equilibrium rent dissipation in our contest is larger than in the benchmark case. Rent dissipation is larger under cross-shareholdings if and only if one firm is much more efficient than the other firm, and the cross-shareholding in the more efficient firm is sufficiently smaller than the cross-shareholding in the less efficient firm.

Keywords: Rent-seeking contest; Rent dissipation; Cross-shareholdings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 D7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167718720300485
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:indorg:v:71:y:2020:i:c:s0167718720300485

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijindorg.2020.102625

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Industrial Organization is currently edited by P. Bajari, B. Caillaud and N. Gandal

More articles in International Journal of Industrial Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().