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Capturing Regulatory Reality: Stigler’S The Theory Of Economic Regulation, Christopher Carrigan, Cary Coglianese
Capturing Regulatory Reality: Stigler’S The Theory Of Economic Regulation, Christopher Carrigan, Cary Coglianese
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This paper offers a retrospective assessment of economist George Stigler’s classic article, The Theory of Economic Regulation. Stigler argued that regulation is a product that, just like any other product, is produced in a market, and that it can be acquired from the governmental “marketplace” by business firms to serve their private interests and create barriers to entry for potential competitors. He challenged the idea that regulation arises solely to serve the public interest and demonstrated that important political advantages held by businesses can contribute to industry capture of the regulatory process. Although his argument was largely based on …
Comparison Excluding Commitments: Incommensurability, Adjudication, And The Unnoticed Example Of Trade Disputes, Sungjoon Cho, Richard Warner
Comparison Excluding Commitments: Incommensurability, Adjudication, And The Unnoticed Example Of Trade Disputes, Sungjoon Cho, Richard Warner
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We claim that there are important cases of “incommensurability” in public policymaking, in which all relevant reasons are not always comparable on a common scale as better, worse, or equally good. Courts often fail to confront this. We are by no means the first to contend that incommensurability exists. Yet incommensurability’s proponents have failed to sway the courts mainly because they overlook the fact that there are two types of incommensurability. The first (“incompleteness incommensurability”) consists of the lack of any appropriate metric for making the comparison. We argue that this type of incommensurability is relatively unproblematic in that courts …
Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters
Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters
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Government officials who run administrative agencies must make countless decisions every day about what issues and work to prioritize. These agenda-setting decisions hold enormous implications for the shape of law and public policy, but they have received remarkably little attention by either administrative law scholars or social scientists who study the bureaucracy. Existing research offers few insights about the institutions, norms, and inputs that shape and constrain agency discretion over their agendas or about the strategies that officials employ in choosing to elevate certain issues while putting others on the back burner. In this article, we advance the study of …