Industries tend to capture and steer the regulators overseeing them.
Stigler's 1971 argument. The mechanism is asymmetric attention: the industry lives with the regulation daily and the public does not, so the industry's preferences dominate the detail.
In practice
- A consultation on a technical annex draws eleven detailed responses, nine of them from the firms affected and none from a customer.
- A technical standard drafted in a committee where four firms send experts and consumers send nobody will reflect the firms, without anyone acting improperly.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works