Compare methods

	Rent-Seeking Analysis	Collective Action Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1967	1965
Originator	Gordon Tullock & Anne Krueger	Mancur Olson & Elinor Ostrom
Type	Formal model of political-economic waste	Formal model of group behavior
Seminal source	Tullock, G. (1967). The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft. Western Economic Journal, 5(3), 224-232.	Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674537514
Aliases	Rent-Seeking Theory, Tullock Rent-Seeking Analysis, Rent-Seeking Contest Model, Directly Unproductive Profit-Seeking	Logic of Collective Action, Olsonian Collective Action Theory, Free-Rider Analysis, Group Size and Public Goods Theory
Related	4	4
Summary	Rent-seeking analysis is the political-economy framework for measuring the social waste created when individuals and firms spend real resources competing for artificially created rents — the extra income generated by monopoly grants, tariffs, licenses, quotas, and other government-conferred privileges — rather than producing new wealth. Gordon Tullock's 1967 article showed that the conventional Harberger triangle drastically understates the cost of monopoly and protection, because the rectangle of monopoly profit, far from being a mere transfer, becomes a prize that competitors will expend resources to capture. Anne Krueger named the activity 'rent-seeking' in 1974 and demonstrated its macroeconomic scale in regulated developing economies. The analysis models the competition for a rent as a contest and asks how much of the prize is dissipated in the struggle to win it.	Collective action analysis explains why rational, self-interested individuals will often fail to act together to secure a common interest, even when every member of the group would benefit from doing so. In his 1965 The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson overturned the prevailing assumption that groups with shared interests would naturally organize to advance them, showing instead that because the fruits of collective action are non-excludable public goods, each member has an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of others. The problem worsens as the group grows: large, latent groups chronically undersupply their collective good unless they offer selective incentives or coerce participation, while small, privileged groups can succeed. Elinor Ostrom's 1990 Governing the Commons later documented how communities craft durable institutions that solve such dilemmas without the state or privatization, earning her the Nobel Prize.