Abstract
Behavioral economics (BE) examines the implications for decision-making when actors suffer from biases documented in the psychological literature. This article considers how such biases affect regulatory decisions. The article posits a simple model of a regulator who serves as an agent to a political overseer. The regulator chooses a policy that accounts for the rewards she receives from the political overseer—whose optimal policy is assumed to maximize short-run outputs that garner political support, rather than long-term welfare outcomes—and the weight the regulator puts on the optimal long run policy. Flawed heuristics and myopia are likely to lead regulators to adopt policies closer to the preferences of political overseers than they would otherwise. The incentive structure for regulators is likely to reward those who adopt politically expedient policies, either intentionally (due to a desire to please the political overseer) or accidentally (due to bounded rationality). The article urges that careful thought be given to calls for greater state intervention, especially when those calls seek to correct firm biases. The article proposes measures that focus rewards to regulators on outcomes rather than outputs as a way to help ameliorate regulatory biases.
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Acknowledgments
We thank participants in the CRRI Eastern and Western Conferences, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. We are grateful to Angela Diveley for superb research assistance.
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Cooper and Kovacic completed part of this paper while at the Federal Trade Commission. The views expressed are ours alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Trade Commission or any other individual commissioner.
An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11149-012-9186-3.
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Cooper, J.C., Kovacic, W.E. Behavioral economics: implications for regulatory behavior. J Regul Econ 41, 41–58 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11149-011-9180-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11149-011-9180-1