---
title: "Hotelling's rule"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Hotelling's rule"
aliases: ["the r-percent rule","Hotelling's r-percent rule"]
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["shadow price (resource economics)","Harold Hotelling","Margaret E. Slade","unforgeable cost of production (bridge/counterpoint)"]
---


The classical theoretical claim, from [[entity-harold-hotelling|Harold Hotelling]]'s 1931 model of exhaustible-resource extraction, that the shadow price of a depletable resource must rise at the rate of interest under optimal extraction — a smooth, continuous appreciation driven by an intertemporal arbitrage condition, not by production cost. First flagged in the vault as a missing counterpoint to the [[observation-unforgeable-costliness-bridges-asteroid-pgm-and-bit-gold|unforgeable-costliness cluster]] before a primary source existed for it; [[entity-margaret-e-slade|Slade]] and [[entity-henry-thille|Thille]]'s review supplied that source.

## References
- [[claim-hotellings-rule-shadow-price-rises-at-rate-of-interest]] · [[claim-hotellings-rule-predicts-shape-distinct-from-cost-of-production-cluster]] · [[claim-hotelling-model-frequently-rejected-by-empirical-commodity-data]]
- [[claim-asteroid-pgm-price-holds-then-collapses]] · [[claim-cheaper-extraction-disruptions-fall-monotonically-not-hold-then-collapse]] · [[observation-unforgeable-costliness-bridges-asteroid-pgm-and-bit-gold]]
- Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-16-does-hotellings-rule-for-exhaustible-resource-pricing-predict.md