This paper challenges the increasingly common view that the findings of behavioural economics constitute a fourth type of market failure. The market failure framework elevates the standard competitive market model to the status of an ideal. It provides us with tools to identify departures from...

potential benefits made available by market liberalization process. The two major issues are the low level of retail switching among gas and electricity suppliers and the scarcity of investments in energy efficiency. According to EU wide surveys, these outcomes are mainly due to a widespread...

China's food safety system is characterized by widespread under-enforcement of regulations punctuated by high-profile food safety scandals. While there has been a wave of public and scholarly interest, official data on food safety are scarce, and some fundamental questions remain unanswered. We...

Public infrastructure services have been subject to dramatic regulatory reform since the 1980s in the European Union, particularly privatization, at the national level, and increased liberalization and deregulation, via the Single Market Programme. Despite this ambitious reform programme, there...

This essay concerns the ways in which public services – particularly household services such as communications, energy, water and transportation – have been regulated and deregulated, and analyses what consequences this has for users and citizens. Much of the deregulation of public services...

Among the many parts of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, few have received as much mainstream attention as the creation of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. As is often the case with legislation in recent years, though, some of the most vocalized...

This essay considers the role of reputational information in our marketplace. It explains how well-functioning marketplaces depend on the vibrant flow of accurate reputational information, and how misdirected regulation of reputational information could harm marketplace mechanisms. It then...

The unstated assumption underlying the drive for a la carte regulation and family-friendly tiering mandates is that government can somehow magically create a right to receive video programming on any terms you wish. Certainly if you don't like what your current video service provider has to...

The purpose of the paper is to identify global best practice in the regulation of quality of service on cellular wireless networks. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents an identification of issues from the literature and an analysis of examples of activities of regulators around the...