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THE TERM RENT SEEKING WAS COINED BY ANNE KRUEGER IN 1974. THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT WAS, HOWEVER, DEVELOPED BY GORDON TULLOCK IN 1967 AND IT WAS TULLOCK WHO CAN TAKE MUCH OF THE CREDIT FOR THE THEORY'S SUBSEQUENT AND RAPID DEVELOPMENT. THE AUTHOR ARGUES THAT THE CLAIM THAT RENT SEEKING IS PERNICIOUS OFTEN AMOUNTS TO LITTLE MORE THAN A SIMPLE TAUTOLOGY. HE SHOWS THAT BY UNROLLING THE LOGIC OF TULLOCK'S ARGUMENT, AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF RENT SEEKING CAN BE CONSTRUCTED.

The quest for benefit from existing wealth or by seeking privileged benefit through influence over policy is known as rent seeking. Much rent seeking activity involves government and political decisions and is therefore in the domain of political economy, although rent seeking can also take place in personal relations and within firms and bureaucracies. The contributions in this outstanding volume provide an accompaniment or 'companion' to the literature on rent seeking and the related political economy of rent creation and extraction. The chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, demonstrate the centrality of rent-related incentives to the study of economics, politics, culture, public administration and history. The expert and original contributions summarize and extend the literature in both theoretical and applied areas of research. The book begins with a clear and comprehensive description of the theory of rent seeking and of contest design for political and bureaucratic rent extraction. This is followed by a series of case studies showing the relevance of rent seeking for regulatory policies, international-trade policies, public finance, natural-resource discoveries, development aid, behavior in international bureaucracies, litigation and judicial systems. The applied chapters also include overviews of rent seeking and rent extraction in Europe, Russia, Asia, Africa and the US. This volume will appeal to a broad readership, including economists, political scientists and development practitioners, wishing to gain an understanding of the concept of rent seeking. The chapters in this book also provide an excellent introduction to the extensive literature.

Financial abuse of power and making decisions that would guarantee the achievement of personal goals have attracted the attention of many Iranian intellectuals in recent years. Evidently, these problems indicate a kind of corruption which is in turn caused by discrimination. A clear example of discrimination in the economic literature is rent seeking; a sinister phenomenon through which windfall wealth is gained. Nowadays, in Iran, the negative meaning of rent usually comes to mind. Unfortunately, it must be stated that political, administrative and financial corruption as well as different types of rent seeking especially economic and political rent have turned into one of the most important problems in the society. Presence of entire governments and politics of rentierism ihas intensifiednsified those problems. Rent seeking, weakens the motivation to work and be productive and causes productive powers to go astray and do wrong. In a society of rent-seekers, sources of wealth, education and power become exclusive and discrimination and corruption, bribery, and consideration of family relationships rather than the rules, unlawful appointments and dismissals, etc. spread all over the society.

Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of political culture and of valuation asymmetry on discrimination between the contestants. The weights assigned to the public well being and the contestants' efforts represent the political culture while discrimination is an endogenous variable that characterizes the mechanism allocating the prize. We consider situations under which the optimal bias of the designer is in favor of the contestant with the larger or smaller prize valuation and examine the effect of changes in the political culture and in valuation asymmetry on the designer's preferred discrimination between the contestants. Focusing on the two most widely studied types of contest success functions (deterministic all-pay-auctions and logit CSFs), we show that an all-pay auction is always the preferred CSF from the point of view of the contest designer. This result provides a new political-economic micro foundation to some of the most commonly used models in the contest literature.