Researchers who evaluate ordinary dispute resolution procedures understandably ask whether disputants are eventually satisfied with the resulting outcomes. But how should they evaluate techniques for involving the public in regulatory policymaking, i.e., techniques such as comment solicitation,...

We examine a rapidly emerging regulatory approach that we label management-based regulation. Management-based regulation shifts the locus of policy discretion from the government regulator to the regulated entity. Government directs private firms to incorporate public goals into their management...

The Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal of 2015 not only pushed that company’s stock and retail sales into freefall, but also raised serious questions about the efficacy of existing regulatory controls. The same furtive actions taken by Volkswagen had been taken nearly twenty years earlier by...

Deciding whether to regulate involves more than making a choice between complete freedom and total control. Individuals and businesses can be regulated but still retain considerable discretion – even to the point of selecting on their own the rules that apply to themselves. In this paper, we...

Regulation scholars have long searched for the best tools to use to achieve public policy goals, generating an extensive body of research on what has become known as instrument choice. By contrast, analysis of options for structuring how officials make regulatory decisions – process choice –...

Government regulators have shown considerable interest in encouraging businesses to participate in voluntary environmental programs and practice environmental stewardship in ways that go beyond what regulations require. At the same time, researchers have increasingly worked to understand how...

“Flexible regulation” might sound like an oxymoron but it has become a widely accepted catch phrase for a pragmatic approach to regulation that promises the achievement of important public policy objectives at relatively low cost. Given the growing interest in flexible regulation in recent...

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,...

Much economic activity in the United States today emanates from technological advances that optimize through contextualization. Innovations as varied as Airbnb and Uber, fintech firms, and precision medicine are transforming major sectors in the economy by customizing goods and services as well...

Regulatory policy has long been a source of controversy, eliciting criticism and calls for reform from virtually all quarters. In recent years, reform proposals have typically sought to restructure the institutional environment of regulatory policymaking by changing administrative law and...