Lobbying and discretion

When interest groups compete to influence legislators, the resulting legislation is often vague, and thus obliges the groups to continue their fight in the executive. On its face, this seems inefficient—at least from the point of view of the groups. We explore this intuition in a model of “nested lobbying” in which interest groups first compete to influence a legislative agenda setter, then compete to influence legislative votes over the resulting agenda. If the resulting legislation grants discretion to the executive, the final prize is allocated in yet one more contest in the bureaucracy. We find that when the status quo is non-discretionary, competition over the agenda never results in an agenda that includes discretion. Surprisingly, however, a discretionary status quo can stand with probability 1 if the preferences of the bureaucracy, the legislature, and the agenda setter are arranged in an “iron triangle”. Specifically, the bureaucracy and agenda setter must be biased in favor of one group, while the legislature is biased in favor of the other.     

Modifying Conjoint Methods to Model Managers' Reactions to Business Environmental Trends: An Application to Modeling Retailer Reactions to Sales Trends

This article proposes and demonstrates how conjoint methods can be adapted to allow the modeling of managerial reactions to various changes in economic and competitive environments and their effects on observed sales levels. Because in general micro-level data on strategic decision making over time are difficult and expensive to obtain, this approach can be of much value to the further study of managerial strategic behavior and market dynamics. In our application we model retailer reactions to changes in their sales, focusing in particular on the actions that affect the demand for retail space and possibilities to improve retail sites. Choice responses to hypothetical sales and environmental trend scenarios are collected from 183 retailers and used to estimate to logit regression model that predicts retailers' probabilities of choosing actions. The model results confirm that retailers are more likely to take action when sales go down than when they go up, and also that they react more quickly if sales go down. It is also found that retailers are more reluctant to change the positioning of their store when confronted with a sales increase than when confronted with a sales decrease. The model is compared with a non-experimental model that is based on retailers' reactions to the trends they report to have observed for their own stores. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this research for the further development of conjoint-like approaches to studying entrepreneurial behavior.     

Family Members' Projections of Each Other's Preference and Influence: A Two-Stage Conjoint Approach

Two important sources of error that may limit the accuracy of individual family members' projections of joint family preferences are: (i) misperceptions of other members' preferences, and (ii) misperceptions of other members' influence in joint family evaluations. We propose a two-stage conjoint approach to study these potential errors. Stage one compares family members' projections of each other's preferences to members' self-reported preferences. Stage two compares family members' projections of each other's influence to observed influence in joint family preferences. An empirical illustration shows that family members are relatively poor predictors of preference, but fairly accurate predictors of influence, in the area of family holiday preferences.     

Measuring values using best‐worst scaling: The LOV example

The paper discusses the way that values have been measured and suggests an alternative way to collect values data. A recently developed approach, termed Best Worst Scaling, developed by Louviere and his colleagues, offers an opportunity to collect such data in a way that may produce more desirable values estimates. Kahle's (1983) List of Values, which has been widely employed in consumer research, was used to examine differences between the new approach and traditional ratings and rankings approaches. The results suggest that the new technique may provide better outcomes and that researchers should think about its potential usefulness in future research with these and other scales. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Pillage and property

This paper introduces a class of coalitional games, called pillage games, as a model of Hobbesian anarchy. Any coalition can pillage, costlessly and with certainty, any less powerful coalition. Power is endogenous, so a pillage game does not have a characteristic function, but pillage provides a domination concept that defines a stable set, which represents an endogenous balance of power. Every stable set contains only finitely many allocations, and can be represented as a farsighted core. Additional results are obtained for particular games, including the game in which the power of each coalition is determined by its total wealth.