Extracting uncompensated value from others by manipulation of the economic environment; often including regulations or other government decisions. Rent-seeking is often associated with lobbying for economic regulations such as tariffs. If a firm can calculate the cost of lobbying, bribing, or otherwise causing the government to enact a favorable regulation, then it can compare this cost with that needed to accomplish a similar benefit within the market -- for instance, by capital improvements or increased efficiency.
In economics, rent seeking is the process by which an individual, organization, or firm seeks to capture economic rent through exploitation or manipulation of the economic environment, rather than earning profits through trade and the production of added wealth. Rent seeking generally implies the extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity, such as by gaining control of land and other pre-existing natural resources, or by imposing burdensome regulations or other government decisions that may affect consumers or businesses. There are evidently few people in modern industrialized countries who do not gain something, directly or indirectly, through rent seeking of one sort or another -- but even fewer who obtain any net benefit from rent seeking in the aggregate.