IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-540-79182-9_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Forty Years of Research on Rent Seeking: An Overview

In: 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 1

Author

Listed:
  • Roger D. Congleton
  • Arye L. Hillman
  • Kai A. Konrad

Abstract

The quest for rents has always been part of human behavior. People have long fought and contended over possessions, rather than directing abilities and resources to productive activity. The great empires and conquests were the consequences of successful rent seeking. Resources were also expended in defending the rents that the empires provided. The unproductive use of resources to contest, rather than create wealth, also occurred within societies in attempts to replace incumbent rulers and in seeking the favor of rulers who dispensed rewards and indeed often determined life and death. Sacrifices made by early peoples to their deities were instances of rent seeking; valuable possessions were given up with the intent of seeking to influence assignment of other rewards. In contemporary times, rent seeking takes place within democratic institutions and also under conditions of autocracy that are akin to the circumstances of the earlier rent-dispensing despots. Incentives for rent seeking are present whenever decisions of others influence personal outcomes or more broadly when resources can be used to affect distributional outcomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Roger D. Congleton & Arye L. Hillman & Kai A. Konrad, 2008. "Forty Years of Research on Rent Seeking: An Overview," Springer Books, in: Roger D. Congleton & Arye L. Hillman & Kai A. Konrad (ed.), 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 1, pages 1-42, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-79182-9_1
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-79182-9_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    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:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-79182-9_1. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.