That Congress is corrupt is no secret. Polls show that it is held in very low esteem by the public. Why is that? The effectiveness of voter control of public policy in a system of representative government depends on compatibility of representative incentives with voter preferences. Many...

A country that leads the world in the development of the technologies that have revolutionized communications services should not have a second-rate system for regulating those services. Our communication policy is an embarrassment to the United States and a bad example to other countries....

Why is regulatory reform and deregulation so difficult to achieve? Using the example of proposed federal regulation of (apparently non-existent) wholesale-level bundling of video networks, I explore the non-economic motivations for economic regulation. It appears that the political system...

This paper deals with two related subjects. The first is the failure of economic analysis to trigger elimination of welfare-reducing public policies affecting the older mass media technologies, such as broadcasting. The second is some speculation about policy issues that may continue or arise in...

Apparent ignorance of more than a century of economic history now threatens the competitive constitution of the Internet under the guise of “net neutrality.” Net neutrality is a slogan that stands for the proposition that the Internet and physical means of access to it should be available to...

Only when we understand why open access is necessary can we design an implementation that is responsive to the particular form of market failure that gives rise to the need for regulatory intervention. Otherwise, we are “shooting in the dark.” There are at least two equal access issues:...

More than twelve years have elapsed since China began its efforts to enact a comprehensive antitrust law. Today, drafts of the law are still being debated. Such a protracted legislative process is highly unusual in China, and can only be explained by the controversy the draft law generates....

There are varied models of regulatory agency behavior. Economists have recently emphasized the incentive-incompatibility of agencies “captured” by regulated entities and a legislature concerned with welfare maximization. This conflict is characterized as a principal-agent problem to which...