We analyze how proxy advisors, which sell voting recommendations to shareholders, affect corporate decision-making. If the quality of the advisor's information is low, there is overreliance on its recommendations and insufficient private information production. In contrast, if the advisor's...

Disclosure of lobbying activity has become much more timely and stringent in the US, and many demand similar regulation also for lobbying in the European Union. Disclosure informs voters about a lobbyist’s activity, but it also informs rival lobbying groups, with strategic consequences. Under...

We characterize the distributions of posterior quantiles under a given prior. Unlike the distributions of posterior means, which are known to be mean-preserving contractions of the prior, the distributions of a posterior quantile coincide with a first-order stochastic dominance interval bounded...

Increasingly, lobbying groups are subject to transparency requirements, obliging them to provide detailed information about their business. We study the effect this transparency policy has on the nature of lobbying competition. Under mild conditions, mandated transparency leads to an increase in...

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocation reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...

The so-called excess-entry theorem (Mankiw and Whinston 1986, Suzumura and Kiyono, 1987) establishes conditions guaranteeing that more firms enter a homogeneous Cournotoligopoly in equilibrium than a benevolent government prefers. We generalise the approach and analyse the behaviour of a...

The concepts of rentiership and intellectual monopoly have gained increased prominence in discussions about the transformation of global capitalism in recent years. However, there have been few if any attempts to construct measures for rentiership and intellectual monopoly using firm-level...

We study the effects of time-using rent-seeking activities on the macroeconomic allocation and the economic growth rate. We formulate a highly stylized three-sector general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of individuals. The production side features one sector producing the...

This paper considers the players' behaviour in an asymmetric two-player contest. When do they decide to "struggle" and when to "subjugate"? Analysing contest-success functions it is found that two crucial prerequisites for "struggle" or "war" have to be met. Thus, such an equilibrium is possible...

This paper studies a large class of imperfectly discriminating contests, referred to as elastic contests, that induce players to either overbid a standing bid or to abstain from bidding altogether. Many common forms of contest are elastic. In any equilibrium of an elastic contest, there is...