Can private interest groups influence the decisions of independent experts to achieve their desired outcomes? This study analyzes a common non-market strategy — lobbying powerful politicians — through which interest groups seek to influence the allocation of public funds in the context of peerreviewed funding for research on rare diseases by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We find evid...

In the US, where registration of lobbyists is mandatory, the pharmaceutical industry and private health-care providers spend huge amounts of money seeking to influence health policies and government decisions. In Brazil, where lobbying lacks transparency, there is virtually no data on drug industry expenditure to persuade legislators and government officials of their viewpoints and to influence...

We study corporate non-market strategies designed to influence the lobbying behavior of other special interest groups. We focus on conditions under which costly lobbying is an informative signal to policymakers about the true state of the world, and in which stringent policy is so costly to the firm that the firm is not viewed as a credible source of information. We study three corporate non-ma...

Corruption and lobbying are to some extent substitutes. Through lobbying a firm may be able to "change the rules" to the firm’s advantage. Alternatively, a firm may bribe a bureaucrat to "bend the rules" and thus avoid the cost of compliance. But there are important differences. While a change in the rules is more permanent, the bureaucrat can hardly commit not to ask for bribes also in the fut...

It is well known that some XML elements correspond to objects (in the sense of object-orientation) and others do not. The question we consider in this paper is what benefits we can derive from paying attention to such object semantics, particularly for the problem of keyword queries. Keyword queries against XML data have been studied extensively in recent years, with several lowest-common-ances...

We study three corporate nonmarket strategies designed to influence the lobbying behavior of other special interest groups: (1) astroturf, in which the firm covertly subsidizes a group with similar views to lobby when it normally would not; (2) the bear hug, in which the firm overtly pays a group to alter its lobbying activities; and (3) self-regulation, in which the firm voluntarily limits the...