Screening for Losers: Trade Institutions and Information * Jason S. Davis, University of Pennsylvania November 23, 2020 Abstract Trade law scholars have often argued that international institutions can serve a useful domestic political role by providing a constraint against domestic demands for protec- tion. In this paper, I identify a new way in which such institutions and their particular features can be valuable to governments: namely, that they can provide useful infor- mation about domestic political groups. While governments are responsible for the ad- ministration of most legal trade-related actions, the information that governments need to determine which actions to pursue is often the private information of the firms and interest groups that are lobbying for these actions, and there are significant incentives for such groups to misrepresent this information. This paper uses a formal model to demonstrate that governments can use the multitude of legal options available to them to screen between domestic groups for those with the strongest cases; a selection process which can help to explain, amongst other things, why trade remedies tend to be struc- tured around meeting criteria instead of as “efficient breaches” requiring compensation and why disputes pursued via the WTO have such a high rate of success (approximately 90% for cases that reach the panel stage). Index terms— trade, international institutions, game theory, trade remedies, information, politics, interest groups, screening, WTO * Forthcoming at Review of International Organizations. Many thanks to Marc Busch, Alan Deardorff, Rob Franzese, Barb Koremenos, Elizabeth Menninga, Jim Morrow, Iain Osgood, Joe Ornstein, Jennifer Tobin, and three anonymous reviewers at Review of International Organizations for giving detailed and helpful feedback on prior drafts of this paper. Thanks also go to the participants in the Formal Models in International Relations Conference at USC in 2016 for their comments on a much earlier draft of this paper. 1