Contests are a common method to describe the distribution of many different types of rents. Yet in many of these situations the utilisation of the prize plays an important role in determining agents payoffs and incentives. In this paper, we investigate the incentives to expend effort for a prize that produces consumption externalities and consider alternative regulatory policies. We find relatively more global consumption externalities will increase (decrease) rent seeking when con- sumption externalities are negative (positive). We show how introducing Pigouvian taxation (possibly with revenue transfer) and Coasean bargaining alters equilib- rium effort and payoffs. Pigouvian taxation tends to reduce both effort and payoffs whereas this is not always the case for Coasean bargaining. In the presence of suf- ficiently large consumption externalities, establishing Pigouvian taxation coupled with some element of lump-sum transfer may reduce costly rent seeking effort and improve the welfare of some agents compared to other approaches.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich in its series CER-ETH Economics working paper series with number
09/111.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement D62 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Externalities D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution Q53 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: