Interest groups can influence political decisions in two distinct ways: by offering contributions to political actors and by providing them with relevant information that is advantageous for the group. We analyze the conditions under which interest groups are more inclined to use one or the...

We analyze the incentives for interest groups to lobby the legislature for favorable policy and compare two institutional frameworks, a U.S. Congress-style legislature and a European-style parliament. The results provide a rationale for why lobby groups are more active in the U.S. Congress. The...

We use survey responses by firms to examine the firm-level determinants and effects of political influence, their perception of corruption and prevalence of bribe paying. We find that: (a) measures of political influence and corruption/bribes are uncorrelated at the firm level; (b) firms that...

This paper offers a solution to King Solomon's problem of allocating an indivisible "prize" to two agents. We add time dimension to the original space of outcomes and construct a static mechanism similar to the one used in virtual implementation. The implementation is imminent: the mechanism...

In this paper, virtual implementation is restricted to deliver, on the equilibrium path, either a socially optimal outcome or a status quo: an outcome fixed for all preference profiles. Under such a restriction, for any unanimous and implementable social choice function there is a dictator, who...

This paper offers a solution to King Solomon's problem of allocating an indivisible "prize" to two agents. We add time dimension to the original space of outcomes and construct a static mechanism similar to the one used in virtual implementation. The implementation is imminent: the mechanism...

We study a mechanism design problem where arbitrary restrictions are placed on the sets of first-order beliefs of agents. Calling these restrictions Δ, we use Δ-rationalizability (Battigalli and Siniscalchi, 2003, [5]) as our solution concept, and require that a mechanism virtually implement a...