1. I would like to thank Joseph Jadlow, David Schap, Gordon Tullock, and a referee from The Quarterly Review of Economics and Business for helpful comments on this topic.
2. See Corcoran [1], Corcoran and Karels [2], Higgins, Shughart, and Tollison [4], Hillman and Katz [5], Jadow [6], Rogerson [7], and Tullock [9, 10] for various specifications of the model. For an alternative model, which argues that rents may be dissipated in the form of nonprice competition, see Gifford [3].
3. Other game theoretic solutions to the rent-seeking problem can be found in those articles cited in note 1. While some of these formulations extend outside of the Nash-Cournot equilibrium framework, they all begin their modeling by using the Nash-Cournot solution as the point of departure.
4. Tullock [9], p. 97, reports that the second-order conditions are not met when R N/(N— 2). His statement is incorrect, and the inequality should be reversed.
5. Corcoran [1] and Corcoran and Karels [2] attempt to rationalize a similar result based on a zero expected profit condition that is driven by entry and exit. The result obtained here is independent of the number of rent seekers and depends only on a rational participation rule for risk-neutral individuals.