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Partisan Advocates

Bulletin of Economic Research

Published online on

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of an uninformed decision maker who acquires expert advice prior to making a decision. I show that it is less costly to hire partisan agents than impartial agents, especially under advocacy, and that the decision maker prefers partisan advocacy to other forms of institutions. I also extend the literature, originating with Dewatripont and Tirole (1999), to a setting with contracts that condition on information provided and not just the decision made.