Governments and firms often use committees of experts to help them make complexdecisions, but conflicts of interest could bias experts' recommendations. We focus on whetherfinancial ties to drug companies bias FDA drug advisory committee (AC) members' voting ondrug approval recommendations. We...

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) creates committees of experts who recommend whether new drugs should be approved or rejected. The popular press and earlier studies commonly report that the FDA almost never overrules these recommendations. Some argue that the experts and FDA are...

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...

This comment on the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) draft Strategic Plan FY 2014-FY 2018 addresses two areas that the Commission should consider. First, the Commission should integrate economic analysis into its consumer protection mission to the same degree that it has into its competition...

One of the most vexing problems in privacy policy is identifying consumer harm from unwanted observation; because it is highly subjective and is likely to vary greatly throughout the population, it doesn't lend itself to easy measurement. Yet, these types of situations increasingly are the focal...