In this short paper, we ask the following question: Why is lobbying so endemic in societies? Put another way, might it not be possible to design a social decision rule that assigns to each group its equilibrium probability of success, and sidestep the inefficient waste of resources that results...

In Esteban and Ray (1999) we formalize a model in which individuals lobby before the government in order to benefit from some productivity enhancing government action (infrastructure, direct subsidies, permissions, in short). The government honestly tries to allocate these permissions to the...

The Olson Paradox referes to the observation that larger groups may be less successful in furthering their interests. We address the paradox within an explicit game-theoretic model of lobbying.

We propose a particular channel through which inequality contaminates the resource allocation process and slows economic growth.

We analyze a model of conflict with endogenous choice of effort, where subsets of the contenders may force the resolution to be sequential: First the alliance fights it out with the rest and , in case they win, later they fifht it out among themselves.

In this paper we study the role of lobbying as a form of political participation which conveys information to the governmenton the value attached by each player (individual, sector, region) toreceiving a permission.

We introduce an extension of the Esteban and Ray [Econometrica, 1994] measure of polarization which can be applied to two types of databases:(i) data for which a density function for the income distribution has already be computed (either parametrically or non-parametrically); and (ii) data...