IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ecj/econjl/v103y1993i420p1236-43.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rent Seeking and the Provision of Public Goods

Author

Listed:
  • Gradstein, Mark

Abstract

In this short paper I adopt the public choice school paradigm of modeling a government in order to compare its performance with that of the market in the standard model of the provision of public goods. Private provision is represented by the Cournot-Nash equilibrium in individual contributions. Public provision incorporates rent seeking, whereby some of the aspects of the allocation are determined indirectly by influence activities of the interested parties. Thus, both allocation procedures yield inefficiency, and the question is which procedure results in a greater amount of inefficiency: private provision with its free riding incentives, or public provision with its rent seeking incentives. The results indicate that public provision may well be preferred to private provision of public goods. Thus, superiority of private provision is not guaranteed even in the case of a non-benevolent government. Copyright 1993 by Royal Economic Society.

Suggested Citation

  • Gradstein, Mark, 1993. "Rent Seeking and the Provision of Public Goods," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 103(420), pages 1236-1243, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecj:econjl:v:103:y:1993:i:420:p:1236-43
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-0133%28199309%29103%3A420%3C1236%3ARSATPO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M&origin=bc
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eric Langlais & Marie Obidzinski, 2013. "Elected vs appointed public law enforcers," Working Papers 2013-06, CRESE.
    2. Liston-Heyes, Catherine, 2001. "Setting the Stakes in Environmental Contests," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 1-12, January.
    3. Pavel Ciaian & Jan Pokrivcak, 2005. "Why Some Sectors of Transition Economies are less Reformed than Others? The Case of Research and Education," EERI Research Paper Series EERI_RP_2005_02, Economics and Econometrics Research Institute (EERI), Brussels.
    4. Neugart, Michael & Richiardi, Matteo G., 2013. "Sequential teamwork in competitive environments: Theory and evidence from swimming data," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 186-205.
    5. Kahana, Nava & Nitzan, Shmuel, 1999. "Uncertain preassigned non-contestable and contestable rents," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 43(9), pages 1705-1721, October.
    6. Elie Appelbaum & Eliakim Katz, 1986. "Transfer seeking and avoidance: On the full social costs of rent seeking," Springer Books, in: Roger D. Congleton & Arye L. Hillman & Kai A. Konrad (ed.), 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 1, pages 391-397, Springer.
    7. Nti, Kofi O., 1998. "Effort and performance in group contests," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 14(4), pages 769-781, November.
    8. Epstein, Gil S. & Nitzan, Shmuel, 2004. "Strategic restraint in contests," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 201-210, February.
    9. Hodler, Roland, 2009. "Industrial policy in an imperfect world," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(1), pages 85-93, September.
    10. Ian A. MacKenzie, 2009. "Controlling externalities in the presence of rent seeking," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 09/111, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    11. Ihori, Toshihiro, 1996. "International public goods and contribution productivity differentials," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(1), pages 139-154, July.
    12. Euan Fleming, 1998. "Rent-seeking in rural development projects: its potential causes and measures to reduce its costs," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 10(3), pages 277-299.
    13. Konrad, Kai A., 2007. "Strategy in contests: an introduction [Strategie in Turnieren – eine Einführung]," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Market Processes and Governance SP II 2007-01, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    14. Farhad Nili & Gabriel Talmain, "undated". "Rent-seeking, Occupational Choice and Oil Boom," Discussion Papers 01/11, Department of Economics, University of York.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecj:econjl:v:103:y:1993:i:420:p:1236-43. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing or Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.