We develop a model of policymaking in which a politician decides how much expertise to acquire or how informed to become about issues before interest groups engage in monetary lobbying. For a range of issues, the policymaker prefers to remain clueless about the merits of reform, even when...

This paper compares centralized and decentralized policymaking in a game theoretic model of informational lobbying and political contributions. In the model, an interest group first produces verifiable evidence about the welfare effects of its preferred policy and then engages in monetary...