Should citizens lobby the government to reduce pollution permit endowments or should they participate directly in the market by purchasing and retiring permits? We address this question in a two-stage model. In the first stage firms and citizens exert effort to influence the endowment of...

We model competing groups when players' values for winning are private information, each group's performance equals the best effort ("best shot") of its members, and the group with the best performance wins the contest. At the symmetric equilibrium of symmetric contests, increasing the number of...