Compared with other types of policy, regulation is very persistent, even when inefficient. We propose an explanation for regulatory persistence based on regulatory fog, the phenomenon by which regulation obscures information about the effects of deregulation. We construct a dynamic model of...

We study a setting where a buyer chooses one of several available options whose values are initially unknown but can be discovered through costly search. Search is sequential, with perfect recall, which implies it is optimal for the buyer to search until the best option encountered so far...