Abstract
We study the role of partisan committee members in an information aggregation setup à la Feddersen and Pesendorfer. Based on their analysis we show that interest groups may impose a huge welfare loss on society because their activities distort political outcomes more than would be needed in order to achieve their own objectives. In an information acquisition framework à la Mukhopadhaya/Persico we argue that uninformed interest groups may instead improve the quality of some committee decisions.
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We thank participants of the WZB conference on “Interest groups and economic performance”, an anonymous referee, and in particular Ashish Chaturvedi, Kai Konrad, and Ami Glazer for useful comments.
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Felgenhauer, M., Grüner, H.P. Distortionary lobbying. Economics of Governance 8, 181–195 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-006-0024-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-006-0024-x