Rational Individual Behavior and Collective Irrationality: The Legislative Choice of Regulatory Form

Citation

McCubbins, Mathew Daniel (1983) Rational Individual Behavior and Collective Irrationality: The Legislative Choice of Regulatory Form. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/TWN7-3723. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:10222019-094517033

Abstract

Studies of regulatory choice have focused primarily upon the origins and impacts of regulation. Though the form of the regulatory legislation influences the magnitude and distribution of the costs and benefits from the implementation of the regulation, few of the studies of regulatory choice have addressed the choice of regulatory form. The form of regulatory legislation can be thought to consist of the legislature's choice of regulatory policies and instruments and the degree of substantive and procedural discretion afforded the administering agency by the legislature.

The purpose of this dissertation is to suggest and justify a three-sector model of the choice of regulatory form, wherein a representative legislature, an administrative bureaucracy, and participating interest groups interact to define public policy. The model will be developed formally and hypotheses as to the choice of regulatory form will be derived, largely through partial equilibrium analysis. These hypotheses will suggest that the structure of the regulated industry and the aggregate nature of the preferences of the interest groups involved in the decision process will determine, in large part, the form of the regulatory legislation.

The hypotheses will be operationalized to facilitate the application of empirical data. Empirical data will be of the form of legislative case-studies of various federal regulatory statutes. In these case-studies I shall examine the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Consumer Product Safety Act, the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, and the Civil Aeronautics Act among others. Evidence from these case-studies will be focused to support the operational hypotheses derived and the model from which they were developed.

Thesis Files