Firms often try to influence individuals that, like regulators, are tasked with advising or deciding on behalf of a third party. In a dynamic regulatory setting, we show that a firm may prefer to capture regulators through the promise of a lucrative future job opportunity (i.e., the...

This paper studies the optimal refund mechanism when an uninformed buyer can privately acquire information about his valuation over time. In principle, a refund mechanism can specify the odds that the seller requires the product returned while issuing a (partial) refund, which we call stochastic...