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 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...

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...

Software users can get a better deal on some software by organizing into a large buying group. Creating a consumer cooperative is a promising way to do this. Large group purchases can help solve problems in the software business, including monopoly power, the costs of intellectual "property"...

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations 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...

In order to encourage investment in telecommunication networks, governments have been encouraged to adopt a regulatory state model, with an independent regulatory authority that is subject to a system of appeals and to parliamentary oversight, providing different forms of accountability. The...

State owned corporations have been serial offenders of competition law. Of the 21 abuse ofdominance complaints referred to the Tribunal between October 1999 and September 2016,13 involved former or current SOCs. SOCs often hold monopoly positions and control essentialinfrastructure and the...

Politicians connected to elites who anticipated benefiting from the 1866 Post Roads Act overcame the problem of collective action and passed pro-consumer legislation over the objections of a concentrated economic interest. Mancur Olson's (1965, 1982) theory on the cost of collective action...

Using the political-economic history of the development of telephony during the 1870s as a backdrop, this paper studies a two-player Tullock contest that includes both research effort (R&D) and legal effort (i.e., rent-seeking effort). The two types of efforts complement each other and...

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...