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Bargaining Theory And Regulatory Reform: The Political Logic Of Inefficient Regulation, David B. Spence, Lekha Gopalakrishnan

Vanderbilt Law Review

In this Article David Spence and Lekha Gopalakrishnan pro- pose a new understanding of regulatory bargaining. Economists and others have long argued that the American regulatory system is unnecessarily inefficient. Critics charge that the system is both substantively inefficient, in that it sometimes mandates the use of inefficient means for achieving a regulatory goal, and procedurally inefficient, in its over-reliance on rules. These arguments have led to a wave of regulatory reform experiments in the federal bureaucracy, many of which seek to promote positive-sum changes in regulatory policy through bargaining among private- and public-sector stakeholders. As several commentators have noted, …