The theory of contests: A unified model and review of the literature

•A unified model of rent-seeking is presented.•The paper surveys the literature on rent‐seeking.•Special attention is given to some recent developments.

This paper is a brief review of the literature on contests, with focus on rent-seeking. A fairly general contest model is presented. We show that the Tullock contest model and the first-prize sealed-bid auction model are obtained as special cases. Some important modifications of the basic model are reviewed: hierarchical rent-seeking, rent-seeking under risk aversion, insecure rents, sabotage in rent-seeking contests, contest design, commitment and endogenous order of moves, and dynamic rent-seeking.