Remembering Gordon Tullock

This is a short tribute to Gordon Tullock, and the unique approach to bioeconomic issues that he took. The example used is hoarding behavior by various species of squirrels.     

Understanding Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock was rational to a fault, and he tried to insist that others be fully rational, confronting all with any inconsistency in their thinking. He loved to be shocking. He was also quite generous. Tullock’s willingness to take a chance, as editor of Public Choice, on a paper that he did not understand led to the publication of the most widely cited paper ever published in the journal.     

Reminiscing about Gordon Tullock

Some thoughts about my year with Gordon Tullock and his intellectual contributions,notably rent-seeking.     

The memorable Gordon Tullock

During my visit over 1978-9 to VPI, I got to know Gordon Tullock and his colleagues James Buchanan, Geoff Brennan, and David Friedman well, having meals frequently. I learned from these eloquent debaters a lot in many ways.     

Gordon Tullock: A Nobel Prize left unbestowed

Gordon Tullock (1922–2014) contributed substantially to public choice theory and bioeconomics. This paper discusses some of these contributions. His scientific contributions have left a Nobel Prize unbestowed.     

Gordon Tullock and experimental public choice

In this paper, I discuss Gordon Tullock’s views on Experimentation in Economics, his own research experiment, and his influence on the field of experimental public choice. I argue that Tullock can credibly claim to have been an early supporter of the method and that his work is cited more often than that of other public choice scholars active in the same period. His work on rent seeking forms the basis of an extensive experimental literature and studies on trust, demand revelation and voter turnout have been strongly influenced by Tullock’s work.     

Fond memories of professor Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock made lasting contribution to the economic notion of cost, while his criticism of the adversarial process in common law has generated recurring research into the efficiency of alternative legal systems.     

Gordon Tullock as a political scientist

We consider Gordon Tullock’s impact in political science, focusing on his influence as a scholar and as an academic entrepreneur. It is common to think of Tullock as a “natural economist,” but his formal training at Chicago encompassed considerable coursework related to political science. We consider three sources of information to draw conclusions about Tullock’s contributions in political science: (1) Course syllabi; (2) Citations in academic political science journals; and (3) Impact on the careers of important political scientists, and shaping the intellectual agenda. Our conclusion is that, while Tullock’s work is clearly significant for central questions in political science, and has received some attention, his primary legacy lies in the impact he had on launching and shaping the careers of prominent political scientists, and thus the development of political science scholarship.     

Gordon Tullock as a teacher and mentor

Gordon Tullock was involved in this former graduate student’s life as a dissertation advisor, writing instructor, mentor, and person offering lifelong encouragement. Although my direction was not in public choice, Gordon Tullock has remained a positive influence on everything I have done.     

Gordon Tullock and the Virginia School of Law and Economics

In 1999 Gordon Tullock became Professor at the George Mason University Law School. Tullock’s arrival at George Mason brought the economics department and the law school close together. The work that resulted during those years consolidated the methodological foundations for a different way of thinking about the economic analysis of law—the “functional” approach to law and economics. The functional law and economics approach espoused by the Virginia School was not attacking any of the results of the Chicago School or the Yale School, but rather proposing a methodological shift. This paper presents some of the results developed by this school and illustrates Tullock’s controversial positions on trials and on the common law system, through anecdotes, Tullock’s own work and related scholarly contributions.     

On the extraordinary scholarly life and times of Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock, who passed away at the age of 92 on November 3, 2014, ranks justly near the top of the list of the “founding fathers” of the public choice research program. Most widely known in the academy as coauthor of The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962), Professor Tullock was not named, unfairly in our joint opinion, as co-recipient of James Buchanan’s 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. A good case nevertheless can be made that Gordon earned Nobel laurels on his own account for groundbreaking contributions to the literatures on, among other topics of scholarly study, rent seeking, autocracy, bureaucracy, war and revolution, law and economics and bio-economics. This essay celebrates Gordon Tullock’s major influences on the field of public choice, including his launching of Public Choice, the journal for which both of us have served as editors, and his impacts on scholars working at the many and obviously fruitful intersections of economics and political science.     

Gordon Tullock and Richard McKenzie. The New World of Economics.

The authors extend the literature on the efficacy of high school economics instruction in two directions. First, they assess how much economic knowledge that California students acquired in their compulsory high school course is retained on their entering college. Second, using as a control group some college students from the state of Washington, where there is no mandate for high school economics instruction, the authors evaluate the impact of California's high school economics mandate on students’ economic literacy when they enter college. The testing instrument is the Test of Economic Literacy (TEL).     

Multiple equilibria in Tullock contests

We find the sufficient conditions for the existence of multiple equilibria in Tullock-type contests, and show that asymmetric equilibria arise even under symmetric prize and cost structures. We then present existing contests where multiple equilibria exist under reasonably weak conditions.     

Marginal Subsidies in Tullock Contests

In a general Tullock contest, we examine a situation where a limited resource can be used to provide marginal subsidies to either player (weak or strong), or to increase the prize directly. We show that to maximize total effort, subsidizing the weak/strong player is preferred when the contest is sufficiently accurate/inaccurate. This result generalizes to n‐player lottery contests. In a lottery contest (Tullock contest with ), we derive the optimal scheme for a full range of resource: when the resource is small, it is optimal to only subsidize the weak player; when it is large, both players should be subsidized simultaneously.     

Evolutionary equilibrium in Tullock contests: spite and overdissipation

Tullock's analysis of rent-seeking as a contest is reconsidered from an evolutionary point of view. We show that evolutionarily stable behavior in a Tullock contest exists and differs from behavior in Nash equilibrium. Evolutionarily stable behavior in these contests is robust in a strong sense and may entail overdissipation of the contested rent.     

Tullock on the organization of scientific inquiry

In (Tullock, The organization of inquiry, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1966), Gordon Tullock sets out to establish how knowledge is developed and dispersed in science, to such a high degree of reliability, despite the lack of formal organizational structure. He contrasts this against the unreliability of the “non-sciences”. In this essay, I review his perspective and consider the validity of his proposed reforms.     

Disclosure policy in Tullock contests with asymmetric stochastic entry

We examine how disclosure policy can be optimally designed to incentivize contestants when their participation is exogenously stochastic. In a generalized Tullock contest setting with two players who are asymmetric in both their values and entry probabilities, we fully characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions under which no disclosure dominates full disclosure. We find that the comparison depends solely on a balance effect exercised by entry probabilities on the expected total effort. The optimal disclosure policy must better balance the competition. These conditions continue to hold when the precision r of Tullock contests is endogenously chosen by the designer.