Friendly Lobbying under Time Pressure
P3-1
Presented by: Emiel Awad
Lobbyists often target legislators who are aligned with them rather than opponents. The choice of whom to lobby affects both what information becomes available to legislators and the influence that special interest groups exert on policies. However, the conditions under which allies are targeted are not well understood. We investigate how time pressure affects the strategic decision of whom to lobby. We derive conditions on the cost of delaying policies and on the distribution of legislators' preferences for lobbyists to prefer targeting allies. We show that the use of allied intermediaries has important implications for the duration of policy making and the quality of policy choices. Counter-intuitively, an increase in time pressure can increase the duration of policy making and a longer duration does not always lead to better-informed policies.