Related papers: Inside the West Wing: Lobbying as a contest

In many institutional settings, $k$ items are selected with the goal of representing the underlying distribution of claims, opinions, or characteristics in a large population. We study environments with two adversarial parties whose…

Within the framework of Game Theory, contests study decision-making in those situations or conflicts when rewards depend on the relative rank between contenders rather than their absolute performance. By relying on the formalism of Tullock…

Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…

Social media has been a paramount arena for election campaigns for political actors. While many studies have been paying attention to the political campaigns related to partisanship, politicians also can conduct different campaigns…

In most of the recent literature on state capacity, the significance of wars in state-building assumes that threats from foreign countries generate common interests among domestic groups, leading to larger investments in state capacity.…

This work contributes to a foundational question in economic theory: how do individual-level cognitive biases interact with collective choice mechanisms? We study a setting where voters hold intrinsic preference rankings over a set of…

The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…

We analyze the evolution of political organizations using a model in which agents change their opinions via two competing mechanisms. Two agents may interact and reach consensus, and additionally, individual agents may spontaneously change…

We introduce a way to compare actions in decision problems. One action is safer than another if the set of beliefs at which the decision-maker prefers the safer action expands as the decision-maker becomes more risk averse. We provide a…

This paper looks at a country's optimal central-government optimal policy in a setting where its two identical local jurisdictions compete to attract footloose multinationals to their sites, and where the considered multinationals strictly…

Doing research is fighting, what any other thing the human being could do? Fight against powers or to get powers, that depends on us. Science can be a revolution or deadlocked idleness. Still waters, without hitting the stones along their…

This paper studies a dynamic information acquisition model with payoff externalities. Two players can acquire costly information about an unknown state before taking a safe or risky action. Both information and the action taken are private.…

Using lobbying data from OpenSecrets.org, we offer several experiments applying machine learning techniques to predict if a piece of legislation (US bill) has been subjected to lobbying activities or not. We also investigate the influence…

In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual…

We present an empirical study aimed at analysing the use of viewpoints in an industrial Concurrent Engineering context. Our focus is on the viewpoints expressed in the argumentative process taking place in evaluation meetings. Our results…

A broad current application of algorithms is in formal and quantitative measures of murky concepts -- like merit -- to make decisions. When people strategically respond to these sorts of evaluations in order to gain favorable decision…

This paper presents a theoretical model of an autocrat who controls the media in an attempt to persuade society of his competence. We base our analysis on a Bayesian persuasion framework in which citizens have heterogeneous preferences and…

Competition is one of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, biology and economics. Recent studies of the competition between innovations have highlighted the influence of switching costs and interaction networks, but the problem is…

This paper studies a communication game between an uninformed decision maker and two perfectly informed senders with conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that increases with the size of the misrepresentation.…

This paper considers the scenario in which there are multiple institutions, each with a limited capacity for candidates, and candidates, each with preferences over the institutions. A central entity evaluates the utility of each candidate…