The effects of unproductive lobbying have so far mainly been addressed by the public choice literature on rent-seeking and by Milgrom/Roberts' (1988,1990) work on influence activities in organizations. Our paper makes an attempt to incorporate lobbying into the simple principal-agent framework...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

This paper analyzes truthtelling incentives in pre-vote communication in heterogeneous committees. We generalize the classical Condorcet jury model by introducing a new informational structure that captures consistency of information. In contrast to the impossibility result shown by Coughlan...

In innovation contests, the progress of the competing firms in the innovation process is usually their private information. We analyze an innovation contest in which research firms have a stochastic technology to develop innovations at a fixed cost, but their progress is publicly announced. We...

Holmström’s (1982/99) career concerns model has become an important workhorse for the analysis of agency issues in many fields. The underlying signal jamming argument requires players to use information in a Bayesian way – which may or may not reasonably approximate real-life decision...

This paper develops a model of political consensus in order to explain the missing link between inequality and political redistribution. Political consensu s is an implicit agreement not to vote for extreme policy proposals. We show tha t such an agreement may play an efficiency-enhancing role....

Essential characteristics of corruption are (1) a reciprocity relationship between briber and public official, (2) negative welfare effects, and (3) high penalties when discovered. We separate the influences of these factors in an experiment. In a two-player game reciprocation is economically...

In their seminal paper, Harrington and Hess (1996) discuss a model where candidates differ along two dimensions - ideology which is modeled by the standard Hotelling-Downs formulation and valence factors which encompass traits which all voters agree as desirable. While valence factor is given,...

In a bribery experiment, we test the hypothesis that distributive fairness considerations make relatively well-paid public officials less corruptible. Corrupt decisions impose damages to workers whose wage is varied in two treatments. However, there is no apparent difference in behaviour.

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucrats participate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, but they also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of the total budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbying constitutes a contest among the...