A two sector general equilibrium model is developed in which households can influence the government's choice of the relative price of traded goods and the level of public goods supplied to each sector. The model is used to illustrate key problems addressed by the political economy literature,...

When economic actors are also allowed to become politically active, perhaps to influence a government price policy, they face decision problems with essentially simultaneous political and economic features. If, in addition, two groups struggle to pull the administered price level in opposite...

Governments often establish economic policy in response to political pressure by interest groups. Since these groups' political activities may alter prices, economies so affected cannot be characterized by perfect competition. We develop a model of a "lobbying economy" in which consumers' choice...

Decision based economic theory stresses the central position of the objective function in the behavior of economic agents. Insufficient knowledge of objective functions hampers the development of economic theory. In this article, a methodology for deriving objective functions from conscious...

The objective of this paper is to systematically incorporate lobbying in a microeconomic model of the profit maximizing farmer, derive testable implications of the model and apply it to establish the link, or lack thereof, between policy benefits transferred to farmers and their lobbying...

Shared knowledge structures, such as cognitive categories and relationships, are central to the interpretation of a complex social environment and thus play an important role in mediating between individual preferences and group outcomes. This article defines a "knowledge-induced equilibrium"...

This paper investigates the role of the deterioration of the Turkish public sector balances in the latter half of the 1980's and the evolution of the economic crisis with the aid of a computable general equilibrium model. The theoretical basis of the model utilized in the paper rests upon the...

A simple two-sector endogenous growth model of government spending and growth is developed with a producing and a lobbying sector. Lobbyists divert government spending for private gains. One key innovation is this: With democratization, information (and power) becomes more diffused (public),...