Sequential Legislative Lobbying under Political Certainty

Résumé

In this paper, we analyse the equilibrium of a sequential game-theoretical model of lobbying, based on Groseclose and Snyder (1996), describing a legislature that votes on two alternatives and two opposing lobbies, lobby 0 and lobby 1, that compete by bidding for legislators' votes. In this model there is a strong second-mover advantage, so the lobbyist moving first will make o¤ers to legislators only if he deters any credible counter-reaction from his opponent, i.e. if he anticipates winning the battle. Our main focus is on the calculation of the smallest budget that he needs to win the game and on the distribution of this budget across the legislators. We study the impact of game's key parameters on these two variables and show the connection of this problem with the combinatorics of sets and notions from cooperative game theory.