Reciprocal rent-seeking contests

Hiroyuki Sano

Social Choice and Welfare, 2014, vol. 42, issue 3, 575-596

Abstract: We construct a model in which all rational rent-seekers may be willing to accept a negative payoff in a Tullock contest in which the rent-seekers are driven by reciprocity motives. We show that in the reciprocal Tullock contest, a unique reciprocity equilibrium exists if the reciprocal concerns of rent-seekers are sufficiently small relative to their material concerns, and that otherwise, there are two reciprocity equilibria: a destructive equilibrium and a constructive equilibrium. The individual rent-seeking expenditure in the former equilibrium is more than that in the Nash equilibrium in the original Tullock contest; moreover, over-dissipation can occur in a destructive equilibrium even in the case of constant returns to expenditure. These results derived from our reciprocal contest model are consistent with observations in most existing experimental studies on the Tullock contest. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1007/s00355-013-0742-2

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