In recent years, regulatory agencies, Congress, and the White House have taken steps to increase the use of information technology in the management of the rulemaking process. The latest such “e-rulemaking” effort is the design of a new, government-wide regulatory information system being...

The spate of recent corporate scandals has produced a legislative and regulatory reaction aimed at restoring marketplace integrity. This response – consisting notably of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, implementing regulations and stock market listing standards – has, in turn, affected...

Regulators need to rely on science to understand problems and predict the consequences of regulatory actions, but over-reliance on science can actually contribute to, or at least deflect attention from, incoherent policymaking. In this article, we explore the problems with using science to...

Numerous corporate scandals in the past several years have fueled widespread debate over proposals for government action. The central challenge for government is how to restore corporate integrity and market confidence without overreacting and stifling the dynamism that underlies a strong...

Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, and Ilana Ritov have recently advanced a cognitive explanation for incoherence in legal decisionmaking, showing how decision makers tend to make micro-level judgments that make little sense when viewed from a broader perspective. Among other things,...

Regulation aims to improve the performance of individual and organizational behavior in ways that reduce social harms, whether by improving industry's environmental performance, increasing the safety of transportation systems, or reducing workplace risk. With this in mind, the phrase...

RWP01-012

Whether regulating mutual funds or chemical manufacturers, government's policy decisions depend on information possessed by industry. But it is not in any industry's interests to share information that will lead to costly regulations. So how do government regulators secure needed information...

In the late 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted what the agency considered to be a "bold experiment" in regulatory reinvention, bringing representatives from six industrial sectors together with government officials and NGO representatives to forge a consensus on...

Improvements in environmental quality depend in large measure on changes in private sector management. In recognition of this fact, government and industry have begun in recent years to focus directly on shaping the internal management practices of private firms. New management-based strategies...