摘要：Governments frequently intervene to support domestic industries, but a
surprising amount of this support goes to ailing sectors. We explain this with a
lobbying model that allows for entry and sunk costs. Specifically, policy is
influenced by pressure groups that incur lobbying expenses to create rents. In
expanding industries, entry tends to erode such rents, but in declining
industries, sunk costs rule out entry as long as the rents are not too high.
This asymmetric appropriability of rents means losers lobby harder. Thus it is
not that government policy picks losers, it is that losers pick government
policy
