Politics of Randomness

Gil Epstein and Shmuel Nitzan

No 803, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The main drawback of the public-policy contest is that the notion of contest success function, a crucial component of the contest model, does not have micro-foundations and, therefore, the random behavior of the government seems ad-hoc. In the present paper we propose a partial micro-foundation for the public-policy contest. The possible rationalization of random government behavior is illustrated in the case of the all-pay auction and Tullock's lottery logit functions. We also clarify how stake asymmetry, lobbying-skill asymmetry and return to lobbying effort determine the relative desirability, from the government's point of view, of these CSFs

Keywords: interest groups; policy makers; lobbying; public-policy contests; contest success function; rationalization of random government's behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo_wp803-b.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Politics of Randomness (2006)
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:ces:ceswps:_803

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().