Interest groups can influence political decisions in two distinct ways: by offering contributions to political actors and by providing them with relevant information that is advantageous for the group. We analyze the conditions under which interest groups are more inclined to use one or the...

We analyze the incentives for interest groups to lobby the legislature for favorable policy and compare two institutional frameworks, a U.S. Congress-style legislature and a European-style parliament. The results provide a rationale for why lobby groups are more active in the U.S. Congress. The...

We use survey responses by firms to examine the firm-level determinants and effects of political influence, their perception of corruption and prevalence of bribe paying. We find that: (a) measures of political influence and corruption/bribes are uncorrelated at the firm level; (b) firms that...

We consider robust virtual implementation, where robustness is the requirement that implementation succeed in all type spaces consistent with a given payoff type space as well as with a given space of first-order beliefs about the other agents’ payoff types. This last bit, which constitutes...

In this paper, we study full implementation problem by mechanisms that allow delay. The delay on the equilibrium path may be zero, infinitesimally small or a fixed positive number. In all these three cases, implementable rules are characterized by a monotonicity-like condition alone, including...

In this paper, virtual implementation is restricted so that only a socially optimal outcome or some fixed outcome (a status quo) can be delivered on the equilibrium path. Under such a restriction, any unanimous and implementable social choice function is almost-dictatorial. That is, there is an...

I study costly information acquisition in a two-sided matching problem, such as matching applicants to schools. Applicant's utility is a sum of common and idiosyncratic components. The idiosyncratic component is unknown to applicants but can be learned at a cost. When applicants are assigned...