INFORMATION, ACCESS, AND CONTRIBUTIONS - A SIGNALING MODEL OF LOBBYING

Interest groups pay monetary contributions to gain access and provide information to a policymaker. If their interests are aligned with thos e of the policymaker's constituency, they have costless access and rep ort their private information truthfully. If their interests conflict, they are forced to pay a strictly positive contribution in order to e nhance the credibility of their reports. The policymaker bases her pol icy decision on the competing reports and the size of the contribution s accompanying these reports. The interest groups' contribution decisi ons are plagued by a free rider problem. I derive the implications of this problem for the size and pattern of contributions and for the deg ree of information aggregation.