The behavioral economics research agenda is an ambitious one for several reasons.  The first reason is that behavioral economics requires a theory “true” preferences aside from – and in opposition to — the “revealed” preferences of the decision maker.  A second reason is that while collecting and documenting individual biases in an ad hoc fashion can generate interesting results, policy relevance requires an integrative theory of errors that can predict the sufficient and necessary conditions under which cognitive biases will hamper the decision-making of economic agents.  A third is not unique to behavioral economics but is nonetheless significant: demonstrating that behavioral economics improves predictive power.  The core methodological commitment of the behavioral economics enterprise — as with economics generally at least since Friedman (1953) —  is an empirical one: predictive power.  Indeed, no less than  Christine Jolls, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have described the behavioralist research program as the economic analysis of law “with a higher R-squared,” that is, “a greater power to explain the observed data.”

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Professors Henderson and Ribstein touch on two theoretical failures of the behavioralist movement which both reveal the prematurity of ‘behaviorally-informed’ regulatory proposals: the behavioralist assumptions that (1) behavioral biases theoretically necessitate, or at least enable, public intervention, and (2) governmental entities can net improve individual outcomes over the status quo of unfettered, if limited, human capabilities.  I think both of these observations highlight the shocking dearth of theoretical exploration amongst behavioralists thus far.  I want to focus on connecting these assumptions to the connection between behavioral economics and administrative regulation.

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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.

Read the full piece here. 

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.

Read the full piece here. 

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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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.

Read the full piece here. 

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.

Read the full piece here. 

The problem with behavioral law and economics (and its behavioral economics cousin) is not that it has nothing interesting to say, but rather that the interesting things it has to say do not mean what its proponents think they mean.  It is one thing to claim that people are less rational than we thought.  It even one thing to claim that people are systematically less rational than we thought, in predictable and important ways.  But it is entirely another to presume that the implication of this is a larger scope for government regulation to protect the market and market actors from the depredations of this irrationality.

Read the full piece here.