Document Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
2009
Abstract
Economists and economically-trained lawyers tend to speak about regulation from a perspective organized around the basic norm of optimization. By contrast, an important managerial literature espouses a perspective organized around the basic norm of reliability. The perspectives are not logically inconsistent, but the economist’s view sometimes leads in practice to a preoccupation with decisional simplicity and cost minimization at the expense of complex judgment and learning. Drawing on a literature often ignored by economists and lawyers, I elaborate the contrast between the optimization and reliability perspectives. I then show how it illuminates current discussions of the reform of bank regulation.
Disciplines
Banking and Finance Law | Law | Law and Economics
Recommended Citation
William H. Simon,
Optimization and Its Discontents in Regulatory Design: Bank Regulation as an Example,
Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 10-224
(2009).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1622