Buying supermajorities in the lab

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Fehrler, Sebastian; Schneider, Maik T.
• 署名单位: University of Bremen; University of Bath
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2021.01.007
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 113-154
• 关键词: Legislative lobbying; Vote-buying; Colonel Blotto; Multi-battlefield contests; Experimental political economy

摘要

Many decisions taken in legislatures or committees are subject to lobbying efforts. A seminal contribution to the literature on vote-buying is the legislative-lobbying model pioneered by Groseclose and Snyder (1996), which predicts that lobbies will optimally form supermajorities in many cases. Providing the first empirical assessment of this prominent model, we test its central predictions in the laboratory. While the model assumes sequential moves, we relax this assumption in additional treatments with simultaneous moves. We find that lobbies buy supermajorities as predicted by the theory. Our results also provide supporting evidence for most comparative statics predictions of the legislative lobbying model with respect to legislators? preferences and the lobbies? willingness-to-pay. Many of these results carry over to the simultaneous-move set-up but the predictive power of the model declines. ? 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).