Multimarket Lobbying with Reserves

Abstract

Abstract This article presents a model of two firms with fixed budgets that simultaneously hire lobbyists to obtain exclusive contracts in multiple markets. In a pure-strategy equilibrium, neither firm can increase its payoff by using its reserves to hire more lobbyists in any market. Efficiency criterion is defined in order to facilitate the ranking of lobbyist allocations with the same payoffs, where efficiency is improved with the aggregate number of lobbyists that firms keep on reserve. Efficiency comparisons are used to reduced the number of pure-strategy equilibria.