Abstract
The process of rent seeking refers to the use of political processes to capture payments to a resource beyond the opportunity cost of the resource. I describe an example of rent seeking that coexists with the economic problem of explaining altruism. I use data from real property sales to estimate the value of an economic rent that accrued to an individual as the direct result of a local government public expenditure project on donated land. I argue that we may view the donation of the land as the winning bid in a rent seeking contest and therefore not purely altruistic.
Recommended Citation
Stevenson, Taylor P.
(2019)
"When Beneficence Benefits the Benefactor: Altruism and Rent Seeking,"
Journal of Business, Industry, and Economics: Vol. 24, Article 1.
Available at:
https://roar.una.edu/jobie/vol24/iss1/1