Toward the usable recognition of individual benefits and costs in regulatory analysis and governance
Toward the usable recognition of individual benefits and costs in regulatory analysis and governance
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DOI：
10.1111/rego.12128
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发表时间：
2018-03-01
影响因子：
3
通讯作者：
Finkel, Adam M.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Cranor, Carl F.;Finkel, Adam M.
美国和欧洲的监管机构当之无愧地只关注拟议和最终监管行动的总收益和成本，而不是像轶事一样提到可能承担不成比例的成本或获得不成比例的收益的人群和个人。在成本效益分类账的成本方面尤其如此，在这种分类账上，分析员几乎不费力气甚至告知决策者和公众法规的成本可能是递减分配的，也可能是累进分配的。许多学者和倡导者观察到，监管可以提高市场结果的效率，但对其对公平的不利(或次优)影响持谨慎态度。在这里，我们认为，在不考虑有关成本和收益的分配信息的情况下，监管政策实际上也可能导致对效率概念的暴力，原因有两个：(I)社会不能指望在不确定谁必须蒙受损失以使其他人能够获得更多利益的情况下实现帕累托有效结果；(Ii)由于非自愿风险和强加的监管成本所经历的损害在规模上可能是非线性的(在个人层面上)，效率实际上是这些影响分布形状的强大函数。这篇文章回顾了有关监管成本和收益分布的证据，描述了机构如何未能纳入现成的分布信息，并勾勒出如何分析成本和收益以促进更有效的监管选择和结果的愿景。
Regulatory agencies in the United States and Europe have well-deserved reputations for fixating on the total benefits and costs of proposed and final regulatory actions, without doing any more than anecdotally mentioning the subpopulations and individuals who may bear disproportionate costs or reap disproportionate benefits. This is especially true on the cost side of the cost-benefit ledger, where analysts exert little effort to even inform decisionmakers and the public that the costs of regulations might be distributed either regressively or progressively. Many scholars and advocates have observed that regulation can increase the efficiency of market outcomes, but caution about its untoward (or suboptimal) effects on equity. Here, we argue that without considering distributional information about costs and benefits, regulatory policies in fact can also cause violence to notions of efficiency, for two reasons: (i) society cannot hope to approach Pareto-efficient outcomes without identifying those who must lose so that others can gain more; and (ii) because the harm experienced by involuntary risks and by imposed regulatory costs is likely non-linear in its magnitude (at the individual level), efficiency is, in fact, a strong function of the shape of the distribution of these effects. This article reviews evidence about the distribution of regulatory costs and benefits, describes how agencies fail to incorporate readily available distributional information, and sketches a vision for how they could analyze costs and benefits to promote more efficient regulatory choices and outcomes.