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Pushing the bad away: reverse Tullock contests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Bettina Rockenbach Open the ORCID record for Bettina Rockenbach [Opens in a new window] ,
Sebastian Schneiders  and
Marcin Waligora
Bettina Rockenbach*
Affiliation:
Chair in Behavioral Economics, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany
Sebastian Schneiders
Affiliation:
Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany
Marcin Waligora
Affiliation:
Frontier Economics Ltd., Im Zollhafen 24, 50678 Cologne, Germany
*
e-mail: bettina.rockenbach@uni-koeln.de
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Abstract

The literature on rent-seeking primarily focuses on contests for achieving gains, although contests for avoiding losses are also omnipresent. Examples for such ‘reverse’ contests are activities to prevent the close-down of a local school or the construction of a waste disposal close-by. While under standard preferences, investments in ‘reverse’ and ‘conventional’ contests should not be different, loss aversion predicts contests for avoiding losses to be fiercer than conventional ones. In our experimental data, the difference in investments between conventional and reverse Tullock contests is small and statistically insignificant. We discuss several explanations for this remarkable finding.

Keywords

Rent-seekingContestLoss aversionExperiment

JEL classification

C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior D72: Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Original Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , July 2018 , pp. 73 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0052-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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