Viscusi and Gayer (2015) on Reasons to Distrust Government Nudges

W. Kip Viscusi and Ted Gayer, “Behavioral Public Choice: The Behavioral Paradox of Government Policy.” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 38(3): 973-1007, 2015 [pdf].

• Behavioral departures from full rationality are often used as justifications for government interventions in markets. But the resulting government policies can institutionalize, not rectify, the rationality shortfalls.

• Regulators themselves possess rationality shortfalls, and there are features of the environment in which regulators operate that push them away from pursuing first-best policies.

• If the median voter possesses biases, then a democratic government is likely to share those biases.

• Less-than-rational individuals tend to bear the costs of their errors themselves – not so with regulators. Further, individuals might have enhanced incentives (relative to bureaucrats) to acquire relevant information. Regulators, like all of us, can be overconfident in their abilities.

• Can we trust the claims that people are less-than-rational, or at least the universality of the claims? People are heterogeneous, and what looks like a mistake might reflect specific, reasonable preferences.

• Many consumer durables now have energy efficiency mandates, justified by internalities. But the energy-efficiency misjudgment is far from a proven problem. The claims of energy savings tend to be engineering-based, unavailable in practice, while individual circumstances can rationalize seemingly myopic choices.

• We could be more confident in an even-handed use of behavioral economics if a lot of pre-existing mandates were being replaced by non-coercive nudges. But instead, we see behavioral economics being used to tighten regulation, not to loosen it. Notice that the less-than-complete (narrow) self-interest that behavioralists often emphasize implies that even externalities might be internalized without government policy.

• The EPA instituted a fuel economy labelling requirement that seems intended to remedy all the problems that their later efficiency mandates also targets – don’t they trust their own labelling regulation?

• In dealing with health and safety risks, government does not seem to be more rational than individuals. In practice, worst-case scenarios are over-weighted in regulatory policy; EPA methodology leads to cascading of conservative estimates so that extremely low-likelihood problems can dominate policy. Further, the number of people exposed to a risk, which should be central in formulating policy, is ignored.

• Increases in risk are a sort of loss, and loss aversion kicks in – in the form of alarmist regulatory responses to ebola, terrorism, etc.

• The FDA fears errors of commission much more than errors of omission. [Nonetheless, the evidence base is weak – look how often risks are revealed only after approval; then there are off-label uses, which are quite legal, despite not having been tested in the usual sorts of controlled trials.]

• If organic veggies carry less risk than non-organic vegetables, but they cost more, it could still be better health-wise for people to eat more, non-organic veggies.

• For people to accept a small increase in risk often involves a payment some six times larger than they would pay for the same reduction in risk – a reflection of loss aversion. The “first, do no harm” principle leads to a similar effect in policy. It is often hard to identify victims of the FDA’s failure to approve a useful drug.

• Agencies can have tunnel vision, treating their issue in isolation. In OSHA, for example, regulators are not even allowed to look at the costs of fixing a hazard. One result: costs per life saved vary widely across domains, in ways that seem to be far from optimal.