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...

Restrictions on certifiers' fee structures are irrelevant for maximizing their profits and trade efficiency, and for the implementability of (monotone) distributions of rents. The irrelevance results exploit that certification schemes involve two substitutable dimensions-the fee structure and...