How does the informational role of interest groups interact with institutions in the political control of the bureaucracy? In 1992, Banks and Weingast argued that bureaucrats hold an informational advantage vis-a-vis political principals concerning variables with direct policy relevance, and...

A model of group decision-making is studied, in which one of two alternatives must be chosen. While group members differ in their valuations of the alternatives, everybody prefers some alternative to disagreement. Our model is distinguished by three features: private information regarding...

Does dropping the rational expectations assumption mean the social planner can implement a larger class of social choice rules? This paper proposes a generalized model of implementation that does not assume rational expectations and characterizes the class of solution concepts requiring Bayesian...

Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only...

The representation of consumer interests in Germany shows an insufficient consumer participation. Coincidentally, the political decision making process profits too little from the informative function of consumer interest groups. This article will demonstrate on the basis of current case studies...

Many collective decision problems have the common feature that individuals' desired outcomes are correlated but not identical. This Paper studies collective decisions with private information about these desired policies. Each agent holds private information that mainly concerns their own bliss...

This paper develops a hierarchical principal-agent model to explore the influence of corruption, bribery, and politically provided oversight of production on the efficiency and level of output of some publicly provided good. Under full information, an honest politician acheives the first best...

Suppose that the goals of a society can be summarized in a social choice rule, i.e., a mapping from relevant underlying parameters to final outcomes. Typically, the underlying parameters (e.g., individual preferences) are private information to the agents in society. The implementation problem...

Many collective decision problems have the common feature that individuals' desired outcomes are correlated but not identical. This paper studies collective decisions with private information about these desired policies. Each agent holds private information which mainly concerns his own bliss...

We consider a two-candidate campaign competition in majoritarian systems with many voters. Some voters are loyal, some can be influenced by campaign spending. Own loyalty with respect to a candidate is the voter's private information. Candidates simultaneously choose their campaign budgets and...