Possibilities To Investigate Transparency And Lobbying In Controlled Environment

Transparency and lobbying, two terms that have direct influences on the behavior of policymakers, politicians, and bureaucrats. Models of both transparency and lobbying exist for decades and are being researched by not only academics but non-profit international organizations and institutions that provide governments with policy recommendations. The recommendations are, however, often based on research that is complicated or almost impossible to perform or relies on self-report surveys by the public officials and policy makers. The real behavior of those actors might, therefore, be hidden. Therefore, there opens an opportunity to model these situations and bring transparency and lobbying into the laboratory or field controlled environment and investigate the behavior of involved actors using methods of experimental economics. As the experimental economics is a field of economic research that has been emerging in the main flow for las few decades, the research on transparency and lobbying is, therefore, emerging as well. There have been published studies that focused on transparency and studies that investigated lobbying, however, the number of publications on experimental research on transparent lobbying is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of experimental research on lobbying and transparency, evaluate the findings and provide suggestions for future research.