INCOME DISTRIBUTION AND RENT SEEKING COSTS: A NOTE

This paper analyzes a rent seeking competition where risk neutral agents have a different income. The individual income is private information but the income distribution is common information. Like the Hillman and Samet (1987) model the individual outlays in rent seeking is equal to the expected rent, but the winning probability for each agent is a function of its income. As a consequence, the social costs of the rent seeking depend on the income distribution and they can be lesser than the traditional measure pointed out by Hillman and Samet (1987).