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...

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...

We examine 89 websites from federal regulatory agencies in order to evaluate their ease of use for those interested in commenting on or learning about their proposed regulations. We find that while there has been a lot of attention given to second and third generation "e-rulemaking" efforts,...

Regulation of business activity is nearly as old as law itself. In the last century, though, the use of regulation by modern governments has grown markedly in both volume and significance, to the point where nearly every facet of today's economy is subject to some form of regulation. When...

Machine-learning algorithms are transforming large segments of the economy as they fuel innovation in search engines, self-driving cars, product marketing, and medical imaging, among many other technologies. As machine learning’s use expands across all facets of society, anxiety has emerged...

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,...