ESSAYS ON LOBBYING AND CRIME

We investigate whether and when the social network among legislators aid a lobby group in influencing voting decisions of legislators. The baseline model involves a group of legislators that are connected via an exogenously given network. Each legislator can vote for the status-quo policy or an alternative policy. A lobby can credibly promise payments to legislators if they vote for the alternative. The lobby chooses these payments to maximize the sum of legislators’ probabilities of voting for the alternative policy subject to a budget constraint. Legislators value the payment they receive, and all legislators are assumed to have a common preference bias towards (or against) the status quo policy. The key feature of the model is that a legislator derives additional utility from voting in line with those legislators with whom she is directly connected in her network.