Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period (1848-2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held on the same day, constituents are more likely to refer...

This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. We characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information. The type of one player is common knowledge. The type of the other player is drawn from a...

We consider a committee voting setup with two rounds of voting where committee members, who possess private information about the state of the world, have to make a binary decision. We investigate incentives for truthful revelation of their information in the first voting period. Coughlan (2000...

Motivated by the recent concerns of the scientists participating in the elaboration of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports, we study a principal-agent relationship between a politician and a researcher that captures some stylized facts regarding the involvement of...

This paper considers the implications of an important cognitive bias in information processing, confirmation bias, in a political agency setting. In the baseline two-period case where only the politician’s actions are observable before the election, we show that when voters have this bias, it...

We model 'money buys access' informational lobbying as a commitment from the policy-maker to observe a lobby's verifiable evidence only upon receiving an access fee. We specifically examine the policy-maker's optimal access fees in the presence of two strictly competing lobbies. Our novel method...

We challenge the prevailing view that pure informational lobbying (in the absence of political contributions and evidence distortion or withholding) leads to better informed policymaking. In the absence of lobbying, the policymaker may prioritize the more-important or ex ante morepromising...

An organization must decide which proposals to fund. In evaluating the proposals, the organization may rely on those applying for funding to produce evidence about the merits of their own proposals. We consider the role of a capacity constraint preventing the organization from funding all...

This survey covers recent literature on lobbying, with particular focus on corporate lobbying. Three main research traditions – contests for policy rent, persuasion games, and multiple means models - are analyzed in detail. Various strategic aspects of lobbying are presented in the context of...