Milton Friedman argued that the social responsibility of firms is to maximize profits. This paper examines this argument for the economic environment envisioned by Friedman in which citizens can personally give to social causes and can invest in profit-maximizing firms and firms that give a...

Activist NGOs have increasingly foregone public politics and turned to private politics to change the practices of firms and industries. This paper focuses on private politics, activist strategies, and nonmarket strategies of targets. A formal theory of an encounter between an activist...

This paper presents theories of strategic nonmarket participation in majority-rule and executive institutions and develops from those theories a set of principles for nonmarket strategy. The theories are based on models of vote recruitment in client and interest-group politics and on models of...

Interest groups seek to influence economic activity through public and private politics. Public politics takes place in the arenas of public institutions, whereas private politics takes place outside public institutions often in the arena of public sentiment. Private politics refers to action by...

Public policies such as regulation, antitrust, and international trade are the result of public politics - a competition over who gets what with government the arbiter of that competition. Policies are a so chosen by private parties without the command or sanction of government. Private policies...

This chapter focuses on the design of regulatory policies that take into account the opportunities for strategic behavior provided by incomplete information and limited observability on the part of the regulator. The design of regulatory mechanisms is straightforward, albeit complex, in such a...