Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 4 by Shaun Hargreaves Heap (King’s College)

Our next IBPPA Online Seminar is scheduled for Wednesday, March 12, at 3 PM (UK time). You can join with this link: https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/j/3429592030

We are delighted to welcome Shaun Hargreaves Heap (King’s College) as our speaker. He will be presenting on: “Regulation: A BPP approach” 

Abstract: Policy is increasingly enacted through the activities of regulators and the conduct of regulators is increasingly subject to criticism. There are good reasons for both trends. This paper shines a particular BPP light on how to reform regulation by taking a 'constitutional' approach. With this approach, policy/regulation is judged as much by the procedural characteristics of the rules constraining behaviour as by the outcomes that are generated by those rules. It is a BPP approach because one of the important behavioural insights is that people often do not have well defined preferences, the satisfaction of which can be used to judge policy. In a liberal-democratic society, there are two central procedural characteristics of rules that matter: equal treatment of individuals and the exercise of individual liberty subject to the harm principle. These are the principles that should guide all regulators.