Compare methods

	Rent-Seeking Analysis	Median Voter Model
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1967	1948
Originator	Gordon Tullock & Anne Krueger	Duncan Black & Anthony Downs
Type	Formal model of political-economic waste	Formal model of electoral competition
Seminal source	Tullock, G. (1967). The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft. Western Economic Journal, 5(3), 224-232.	Black, D. (1948). On the Rationale of Group Decision-making. Journal of Political Economy, 56(1), 23-34.
Aliases	Rent-Seeking Theory, Tullock Rent-Seeking Analysis, Rent-Seeking Contest Model, Directly Unproductive Profit-Seeking	Median Voter Theorem, Black's Median Voter Theorem, Downsian Median Voter Model, Median Voter Equilibrium
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.	The median voter model is a foundational result of political economy stating that, under majority rule with voters whose preferences are single-peaked on a single policy dimension, the ideal point of the median voter is the Condorcet winner — it cannot be beaten by any other alternative in pairwise majority voting. Duncan Black established the theorem formally in 1948, and Anthony Downs extended it in 1957 into a theory of party competition in which two vote-maximizing parties converge to the median voter's preferred policy. The model is the workhorse linking the distribution of citizen preferences to equilibrium policy outcomes in democracies.