Working Paper

Contests Among Bureaucrats

Dieter Bös
CESifo, Munich, 2002

CESifo Working Paper No. 807

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucrats participate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, but they also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of the total budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbying constitutes a contest among the bureaucrats. This paper characterizes the Nash equilibria in lobbying and shows in which way exogenously fixed bureaucratic incomes induce the same or different lobbying behavior as incentive incomes.

Keywords: bureaucracy, lobbying, contests