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...

This paper presents a positive theory of corporate social responsibility set in a managerial capitalism context in which managers instead of markets allocate resources, including social expenditures. The theory focuses jointly on the operational management of the firm and on its social...

This paper provides a theory of firm behavior motivated by moral duty, self-interest, and social pressure. A morally-managed and a self-interested firm compete in a market in which their corporate social performance (CSP) provides product differentiation. In addition to acting as consumers,...

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...

The news media plays an essential role in society, but surveys indicate that the media is widely viewed as biased. This paper presents a theory of media bias that originates with private information obtained by journalists through their investigations and persists despite profit-maximizing news...

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...

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...

This paper presents a theory of common agency lobbying in which policy-interested lobbies can first influence the choice of a proto-coalition and then influence the legislative bargaining over policy within that coalition. The equilibrium policy in the legislative bargaining stage maximizes the...

Develops a theory for the demand for the advising and distribution services of investment banks when there is information asymmetry between an issuer of new securities and the investment bankers. The advising services of the investment banker are valuable when the banker has better information...