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Tom Brown on Camel Spotting — Is Behavioral Economics Really Beyond Redemption?

TOTM At the outset let me thank our hosts for inviting me to participate in what I have come to think of as Truth On The . . .

At the outset let me thank our hosts for inviting me to participate in what I have come to think of as Truth On The Markets’ annual symposium on topics of particular interest to me. Last year at roughly this same time, TOTM sponsored a symposium on what many surely regarded as an obscure topic, but this year’s subject—the role, if any behavioral economics should play in regulatory policy—should be of much wider interest. Although this topic has a connection to the consumer credit industry (a connection that I plan to explore in a comment on Richard’s post from yesterday), I want to start with the more general question of whether we should be concerned about any effort on the part of the Obama Administration to incorporate the lessons of behavioral economics in regulatory policy. Recognizing that I may be putting invitations to future TOTM symposia at risk by saying so, I think that the answer to this question is no.

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Financial Regulation & Corporate Governance

Todd Henderson on Project Behavior: What the Battle is Really About

TOTM Lying in bed for the past day with a stomach bug, I’ve enjoyed reading the contributions of my friends and colleagues. Perhaps the wisest course . . .

Lying in bed for the past day with a stomach bug, I’ve enjoyed reading the contributions of my friends and colleagues. Perhaps the wisest course would be to, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character pretending to be a doctor in “Catch Me If You Can,” say “I concur” and slip back under the covers. My general views on the subject of Project Behavior (you can choose your reference: either “Project Runway” or Project Mayhem from “Fight Club”), align with the likes of Manne the Elder, Manne the Younger, Epstein, Lambert, and so on. No surprise there. But that is what I want to write about – why? More specifically, why do views about the value of Project Behavior cleave along political or ideological lines?

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Financial Regulation & Corporate Governance

Erin O’Hara on The Free Market Side of Behavioral Law and Economics

TOTM Behavioral law and economics (“BLE”) can influence legal policy analysis and regulation in many ways.  On balance, it is not at all clear that this . . .

Behavioral law and economics (“BLE”) can influence legal policy analysis and regulation in many ways.  On balance, it is not at all clear that this new paradigm undermines a policy commitment to markets.  From one vantage point, the BLE movement can be said to help preserve markets. Importantly, those using the paradigm often start with an underlying assumption that markets are good and that regulations are appropriate only to help correct market defects.  Of course, if “defects” are defined too broadly, the default state of market activity is indeed threatened.  However, the idea that the behavioral movement threatens to erode the primacy of markets that would be achieved without the paradigm erroneously assumes that a government would ever sign onto completely unfettered market behavior.  However desirable a free market state of the world might be, the unfettered markets baseline fails to comport with political realities.  Even setting aside insights from public choice theory (which predicts policy interference with markets), there is always the sense that people aren’t the purely informed rational actors that law and economics models might assume.  Too many people we know and love—our parents, kids, cousins, even ourselves—suffer harm from their decisions as a consequence of a failure to investigate, overcome biases, properly value options etc.  Most people carry an intuition that some market taming/correcting mechanisms are appropriate, and BLE at least helps that discussion proceed rigorously. If so, behavioral law and economics might help to ensure that regulatory actions are market preserving relative to the state of government without those insights.

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Financial Regulation & Corporate Governance

Stephen Bainbridge on Mandatory Disclosure: A Behavioral Analysis

TOTM Mandatory disclosure is a—maybe the—defining characteristic of U.S. securities regulation. Issuers selling securities in a public offering must file a registration statement with the SEC . . .

Mandatory disclosure is a—maybe the—defining characteristic of U.S. securities regulation. Issuers selling securities in a public offering must file a registration statement with the SEC containing detailed disclosures, and thereafter comply with the periodic disclosure regime. Although the New Deal-era Congresses that adopted the securities laws thought mandated disclosure was an essential element of securities reform, the mandatory disclosure regime has proven highly controversial among legal academics—especially among law and economics-minded scholars. Some scholars argue market forces will produce optimal levels of disclosure in a regime of voluntary disclosure, while others argue that various market failures necessitate mandatory disclosure.

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Financial Regulation & Corporate Governance

Sprigman and Buccafusco on Behavioral Law and Economics and the Road from Lab to Law

TOTM In our second post, we want to discuss some of the implications of the study (the details of which we described in our first post). . . .

In our second post, we want to discuss some of the implications of the study (the details of which we described in our first post). One of the consistent concerns about BL&E in this symposium is about the too-quick jump from data to policy. We should emphasize that we think more work needs to be done to support these potential policy suggestions, but, importantly, we think that the answers to the policy issues rest fundamentally on empirical questions.

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Intellectual Property & Licensing

Kevin McCabe on Behavioral Economics and the Law

TOTM Having started my career as an experimental economist I probably have a little different, but I hope complimentary, perspective on behavioral economics and other experimental . . .

Having started my career as an experimental economist I probably have a little different, but I hope complimentary, perspective on behavioral economics and other experimental programs in general.

I view the difference between experimental and behavioral economics in terms of (1) what is studied, and (2) how it is studied.  Experimental economists are interested in institutional and organizational rules and how these rules affect both, the joint behavior of participants, and the outcome generating, or process, performance of the institutional rules in question.  To study this the experimental economist induces preferences and implements a microeconomic system.  One major problem for this approach is that ‘risk preferences’ are very noisy, when induced, due either to, the added complexity imposed on subjects of having to work with induced preferences, or that the induced preferences conflict with a subject’s actual preferences.  A second major problem with this approach is that institutional rules that are isolated in the lab often depend on on additional rules that are not being studied, or social and cultural norms that are not present in the lab.  Experimental economists have learned to manage these problems and many interesting research papers have been produced.

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Claire Hill on The Promise of Behavioral Law and Economics

TOTM I want to challenge what seems to be a premise of this symposium: that much of the behavioral “contribution” to economics is about people’s “mistakes” . . .

I want to challenge what seems to be a premise of this symposium: that much of the behavioral “contribution” to economics is about people’s “mistakes” (either cognitive mistakes or “weakness of the will”) and the consequent need for paternalistic intervention.   I think the behavioral perspective has much more to offer; I also think that the focus on mistakes is overblown and pernicious.  Behavioral law and economics was supposed to bring more realism to law and economics.  The worldview in which people are either making mistakes or “getting it right” isn’t much more realistic than the one in which people are always “getting it right.”  Moreover, advancing such a worldview as realistic is a step backwards:  the admittedly “unrealistic” but ostensibly “useful” law and economics is being supplanted by the supposedly more realistic binary world in which people either make mistakes or get it right.  To be sure, of course people sometimes do make “mistakes.” A focus on mistakes that is more methodology (how we proceed) than ontology (how the world is) is quite useful:  of all the ways people act other than as the traditional paradigm predicts, the subset we can label as “mistakes” (and, to be more precise, cognitive mistakes rather than “weakness of the will”) may present a particularly good case for regulatory interventions.  Indeed, the label “mistake” is often used for what is actually “weakness of the will” – not a mistake at all, since a person really does want both cake and good health (and, according to some evidence, she may regret more regularly choosing health over the cake than the cake over health).  In those cases, any regulatory intervention is more appropriately justified by externalities.

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Richard Epstein on The Dangerous Allure of Behavioral Economics: The Relationship between Physical and Financial Products

TOTM Few academic publications have had as much direct public influence on the law as the 2008 article by my NYU colleague Oren Bar-Gill and then . . .

Few academic publications have had as much direct public influence on the law as the 2008 article by my NYU colleague Oren Bar-Gill and then Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren.  In “Making Credit Safer,” they seek to combine two strands of academic thought in support of one great cause—more regulation of financial markets.  They start with the central claim of behavioral economics that sophisticated entrepreneurs are able to take advantage of the systematic foibles of ordinary people, by rigging their products in ways that work systematically to their own advantage.  By plying ordinary individuals will carefully packaged payment contracts, firms can undercut the central postulate of rational choice economics that all voluntary transactions produce mutual gains for the parties.  In its stead we get the wreckage of families and fortunes brought about by unscrupulous bankers in search of a buck.  Warren and Bar-Gill repeatedly talk about the importance of empirical evidence.  Her own work, however, is exceptionally shoddy, as Todd Zywicki has recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal.

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Financial Regulation & Corporate Governance

Ronald Mann on Nudging from Debt

TOTM The idea that the regularity of behavioral departures from full rationality justifies regulatory intervention has rarely gained more credence than in the context of consumer . . .

The idea that the regularity of behavioral departures from full rationality justifies regulatory intervention has rarely gained more credence than in the context of consumer finance.  The Credit CARD Act of 2009 rests on nothing so much as the supposition that cardholder decisions about spending and repayment reflect systematic misapprehension of the likely patterns of future behavior.  And given Elizabeth Warren’s prior writings with Oren Bar-Gill, we can expect the new CFPB to rely heavily on such regulation.

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Financial Regulation & Corporate Governance