We challenge the prevailing view that pure informational lobbying (in the absence of political contributions and evidence distortion or withholding) leads to better informed policymaking. In the absence of lobbying, the policymaker may prioritize the more-important or ex ante morepromising...

Motivated by some real world phenomena, we extend the standard model of decision making with a possibly biased decision maker under career concerns by adding: 1) a consultation stage in which the advice from an advisor is available; 2) the possibility that the decision maker can control the...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an outside expert with informational superiority to a group of people who make a decision by voting on a proposal. An outside expert who observes the qualities of a proposal sends a cheap talk message to decision makers with limited...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an expert with informational superiority to decision makers who vote on a proposal. We show that an expert's simple cheap talk strategy can be surprisingly effective in persuading decision makers by polarizing or unifying their...

This paper attempts to add greater insight into the study of political influence. It analyzes contracts for lobbying by first placing them into their proper political economy context as well as analyzing them in a modified information transmission mechanism. The main contributions include a more...

In this article I analyze a model of interest group influence on legislative voting through information transmission. The model shows how interest groups may manipulate voting coalitions to their advantage by crafting different messages to target different winning coalitions. Furthermore, if...

Policymakers face time and resource constraints in investigating issues and formulating policies. How do these constraints affect information transmission by informed but biased interest groups? We study this question using a model in which interest groups lobby a policymaker by offering...

I consider a stopping game between two players, where observations related to an unknown state of the nature arrive at random. Players not only learn from observing each other, but their payoffs also depend on the presence of the counterpart. I derive a general characterization of an equilibrium...

We consider the problem of optimally acquiring a position in a financial asset by submitting orders to a standard exchange and a dark pool. We assume that volatility is stochastic and trading at the standard exchange causes a price impact. Orders sent to the dark pool do not generate price...

How should a decision-maker allocate R&D funds when a group of experts provides divergent estimates on a technology's potential effectiveness? To address this question, we propose a simple decision-theoretic framework that takes into account ambiguity over the aggregation of expert opinion and a...