This paper studies the information transmission aspect of influence activities within an organization where privately informed division managers strategically communicate divisional information to headquarters to influence its capital allocation decisions. Although costly, influence activities can play a role in transmitting valuable information to headquarters. We define influence activities to be informative if they improve headquarters's inference and detrimental if they hamper it. We find that influence activities are more likely to be informative in organizations that are less averse to risk taking, that rely more on higher-power incentives, and that encourage competition in the form of contest. We also find that competition over scarce resources increases the overall level of influence activities.