The Administrative Procedure Act instructs federal courts to invalidate agency decisions that are quot;arbitraryquot; or quot;capricious.quot; In its 1983 decision in the State Farm case, the Supreme Court firmly endorsed the idea that arbitrariness review requires courts to take a quot;hard...

Many consumers would be willing to pay something to reduce the suffering of animals used as food. The problem is that existing markets do not disclose the relevant treatment of animals, even though that treatment would trouble many consumers. Steps should be taken to promote disclosure, so as to...

Human beings are prone to "misfearing": Sometimes they are fearful in the absence of significant danger, and sometimes they neglect serious risks. Misfearing is a product of bounded rationality, and it produces serious problems for individuals and governments. This essay is a reply to a review...

Excessive borrowing, no less than insufficient savings, might be a product of bounded rationality. Identifiable psychological mechanisms are likely to contribute to excessive borrowing; these include myopia, procrastination, optimism bias, "miswanting," and what might be called cumulative cost...

There is an elaborate debate over the practice of discounting regulatory benefits, such as environmental improvements and decreased risks to health and life, when those benefits will not be enjoyed until some future date. Economists tend to think that as a general rule, such benefits should be...

This review-essay explores the uses and limits of cost-benefit analysis in the context of environmental protection, focusing on three recent books: Priceless, by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling; Cellular Phones, Public Fears, and A Culture of Precaution, by Adam Burgess; and Catastrophe:...

Administrative regulations and tort law both impose controls on activities that cause mortality risks, but they do so in puzzlingly different ways. Under a relatively new and still-controversial procedure, administrative regulations rely on a fixed value of a statistical life representing the...

Administrative regulations and tort law both impose controls on activities that cause mortality risks, but they do so in puzzlingly different ways. Under a relatively new and still-controversial procedure, administrative regulations rely on a fixed value of a statistical life representing the...

Because risks are all on sides of social situations, it is not possible to be globally "precautionary." Hence the Precautionary Principle, in its strongest forms, runs into fatal conceptual difficulties; any precautions will themselves create hazards of one or another kind. When the...

This paper offers a framework for regulating internalities. Using a simple economic model, we provide four principles for designing and evaluating behaviorally-motivated policy. We then outline rules for determining which contexts reliably reflect true preferences and discuss empirical...