Regulated Prices, Rent Seeking, and Consumer Surplus
研究了价格管制如何导致商品错配并鼓励寻租，发现即使供给缺乏弹性，在凸需求或对数凸需求下，管制总会减少消费者剩余，且结果不受分配方式影响。
Price controls lead to misallocation of goods and encourage rent-seeking.\nThe misallocation effect alone ensures that a price control always reduces consumer\nsurplus in an otherwise-competitive market with convex demand if supply\nis more elastic than demand; or with log-convex demand (e.g., constantelasticity)\neven if supply is inelastic. The same results apply whether rationed\ngoods are allocated by costless lottery, or whether costly rent-seeking and/or\npartial decontrol mitigates the inefficiency. Our analysis exploits the observation\nthat in any market, consumer surplus equals the area between the\ndemand curve and the industry marginal revenue curve.