Levine, David K.Modica, Salvatore2016-09-152016-09-152016-05http://hdl.handle.net/10230/27294How can a small special interest group successfully get an inefficient transfer at the expense of a much larger group with many more resources available for lobbying? We consider a simple model of collusive organizations that provide a public good in the form of effort and have a fixed cost per member of acting collusively. Our key result is that the willingness of such a group to pay for a/ngiven prize depends on whether the prize is fungible - that is, whether the prize can be used to pay for itself. If the prize is fungible, as in the case of a transfer payment, a smaller group always has an advantage. If the prize is non-fungible - civil rights for example - willingness to pay first increases then decreases with the size of the group. We use the theory to study agenda setting/nboth with and without blackmail by the politician showing that in general the small group is not too greedy: when it wins it optimally chooses to pre-empt the large group by choosing a prize small enough to equal the large group participation cost.application/pdfengThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properlyattributed.info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaperOrganizationGroupCollusionPublic goodinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess