PhD Lunch Seminars Rotterdam

Speaker(s)
Olivier Herlem (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Date
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Location
Rotterdam

Decision makers may be lobbied by different actors with different resources. In this paper, we model a situation where there are two players (the lobby and the activist) who can influence a decision-maker, by sending her hard information. We assume that the issue of interest may have distinct aspects, but that their relevance to the decision is not a given. More specifically, one aspect may be relevant or not. The lobby is fully informed and can communicate about all the aspects of the decision, if they are relevant. The activist however, only knows about the aspect whose relevance is a priori uncertain and thus can only tell the decision maker whether she should consider it or not. We find that the activist can discipline the lobby to a certain extent, by revealing its information to the decision maker, but that this disciplining may have ambiguous effect, depending on how aligned or opposed the players’ preferences are. Moreover, we find that successful activism generally requires that the activist’s preferences be somewhat aligned with those of the lobby.