Advocates

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Political Economy.The paper's main contribution is to provide a rationale for advocacy. After observing that many organizations (corporations, judiciary, and the executive and legislative branches of government) use competition among enfranchised advocates of special interests to improve policy making, it argues that advocacy has two major benefits. First, the advocates' rewards closely track their performance whereas nonpartisans' incentives are impaired by their pursuing several conflicting causes at one time. Second, advocacy enhances the integrity of decision making by creating strong incentives to appeal in case of an abusive decision. The paper also analyzes the costs of advocacy in terms of manipulation and garbling of information. It further shows that it may be costly for both the organization and interested parties themselves to let these parWe thank Philippe Aghion,

Remedies vs. Extreme Options in Merger Control

“…Our result is in the spirit of Dewatripont and Tirole (1999), even though the underlying mechanism is entirely di¤erent. Dewatripont and Tirole (1999) argue that an inquisitorial regime has less information acquisition incentives due to its aversion against producing two countervailing piece of evidence, thus stopping acquisition too early.…”

“…In a similar manner to Dewatripont and Tirole (1999), Shin (1998) proves the strict superiority of the adversial system over the inquisitorial one if information can be noisy and thus con ‡ict-ing. However, contrary to our setup and similar to Dewatripont and Tirole, he assumes that information may be noisy.…”

“…Assuming a social welfare standard allows us to contrast the inquisitorial enforcement system we have analyzed so far with a system of advocates (see Dewatripont and Tirole, 1999). There is a dichotomy between the inquisitorial legal system and the adversial legal system.…”

“…29 Usually in adversial systems, the court represents a neutral instance without expertise concerning the litigation, which decides according to a simple decision rule (Froeb and Kobayashi, 2001;Dewatripont and Tirole, 1999). 30 If AF holds e, it might pass this piece of information only to the government in case this would decide against the merger anyway.…”

“…As opposed to this, in our setup the inquisitorial regime does not decide often enough for the extreme option. The di¤erence is due to the key mechanism in Dewatripont and Tirole (1999) that information can be con ‡icting so that the inquisitorial regime refrains from looking for a second piece of information which might countervail the …rst piece.…”