This paper analyzes the conditions that lead to the political power position of business by developing a signaling model of corporate lobbying in democratic capitalist societies. Abandoning the traditional dichotomy of structural economic determinants versus business’ political action, the model predicts under which conditions elected political decisionmakers modify their policy pledges to acco...

In the “Protection for Sale” model of Grossman and Helpman (1994), some industries are assumed to be able to overcome the free-rider problem and organize a lobby that represents their group interests while other industries are unable to form a lobby. This dichotomy presents a problem for the many papers that attempt to estimate the model empirically since every industry must be classified as ei...

In popular discussion much has been made recently of the susceptibility of government policies to lobbying by foreigners. The general presumption has also been that such interactions have a deleterious effect on the home economy. However, it can be argued that, in a trade policy context, bending policy in a direction that would suit foreigners may not in fact be harmful: If the policy outcome a...

Scholars have long recognized two classes of special interest group (SIG) expenditures: inside lobbying, which is intended to influence the content a bill; and outside likelihood bill enacted into law. This paper juxtaposes both lobbying activities within single model. Policy choices are function decision-maker's assessment SIGs' willingness engage in lobbying. Importantly, expenditures do not ...

In recent years accounting researchers have identified “political” lobbying as a problem for accounting standard setting. This paper presents a simple game-theoretic analysis of the political process to identify situations where companies have incentives to lobby the political principal instead of participating in the usual due process of accounting standard setting. Analysis of the model sugge...

Article history: Received 18 April 2005 Received in revised form 20 March 2008 Accepted 7 May 2008 Available online 24 May 2008 Which government functions should be decentralized (resp. centralized) once lobbying behavior is taken into account?We find that the answer largely depends on how the interests of the regional lobbies are positioned with respect to the function to be decentralized (res...

This paper investigates the effect of domestic politics on international environmental policy by incorporating into a classic model of coalition formation the phenomenon of lobbying by national special-interest groups. In doing so, it contributes to the theory of international environmental agreements, which has overwhelmingly assumed that governments make choices based on benefits and costs th...

We propose various models for lobbying in a probabilistic environment, in which an actor (called “The Lobby”) seeks to influence the voters’ preferences of voting for or against multiple issues when the voters’ preferences are represented in terms of probabilities. In particular, we provide two evaluation criteria and three bribery methods to formally describe these models, and we consider the ...