Comparer des méthodes

	Public Choice Analysis	Rent-Seeking Analysis
Domaine	Political Economy	Political Economy
Famille	MCDM	MCDM
Année d'origine	1962	1967
Auteur d'origine	James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock	Gordon Tullock & Anne Krueger
Type	Formal framework for collective decision-making	Formal model of political-economic waste
Source fondatrice	Buchanan, J. M., & Tullock, G. (1962). The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. University of Michigan Press. ISBN: 9780865972186	Tullock, G. (1967). The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft. Western Economic Journal, 5(3), 224-232.
Alias	Public Choice Theory, Economics of Politics, Constitutional Political Economy, Virginia School Public Choice	Rent-Seeking Theory, Tullock Rent-Seeking Analysis, Rent-Seeking Contest Model, Directly Unproductive Profit-Seeking
Apparentées	4	4
Résumé	Public choice analysis is the application of the methods of economics — methodological individualism, rational self-interest, and equilibrium reasoning — to the study of political and collective decision-making. Pioneered by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their 1962 book The Calculus of Consent and surveyed comprehensively in Dennis Mueller's Public Choice III, it treats voters, politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups not as benevolent servants of the public interest but as utility-maximizing agents pursuing their own goals within political institutions. A central methodological move is the distinction between constitutional choice — the selection of the rules of the game behind a veil of uncertainty — and in-period choice within those rules. The framework's signature derivation is the optimal decision rule (the optimal majority), found by minimizing the sum of the external costs a rule imposes and the costs of reaching agreement under it.	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.