Archives For behavioral economics

E-cigarette taxation: Lessons from “sin taxes”

Eric Fruits —  3 August 2018

The Economist takes on “sin taxes” in a recent article, “‘Sin’ taxes—eg, on tobacco—are less efficient than they look.” The article has several lessons for policy makers eyeing taxes on e-cigarettes and other vapor products.

Historically, taxes had the key purpose of raising revenues. The “best” taxes would be on goods with few substitutes (i.e., inelastic demand) and on goods deemed to be luxuries. In Wealth of Nations Adam Smith notes:

Sugar, rum, and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.

The Economist notes in 1764, a fiscal crisis driven by wars in North America led Britain’s parliament began enforcing tariffs on sugar and molasses imported from outside the empire. In the U.S., from 1868 until 1913, 90 percent of all federal revenue came from taxes on liquor, beer, wine and tobacco.

Over time, the rationale for these taxes has shifted toward “sin taxes” designed to nudge consumers away from harmful or distasteful consumption. The Temperance movement in the U.S. argued for higher taxes to discourage alcohol consumption. Since the Surgeon General’s warning on the dangers of smoking, tobacco tax increases have been justified as a way to get smokers to quit. More recently, a perceived obesity epidemic has led several American cities as well as Thailand, Britain, Ireland, South Africa to impose taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages to reduce sugar consumption.

Because demand curves slope down, “sin taxes” do change behavior by reducing the quantity demanded. However, for many products subject to such taxes, demand is not especially responsive. For example, as shown in the figure below, a one percent increase in the price of tobacco is associated with a one-half of one percent decrease in sales.

Economist-Sin-Taxes

 

Substitutability is another consideration for tax policy. An increase in the tax on spirits will result in an increase in beer and wine purchases. A high toll on a road will divert traffic to untolled streets that may not be designed for increased traffic volumes. A spike in tobacco taxes in one state will result in a spike in sales in bordering states as well as increase illegal interstate sales or smuggling. The Economist reports:

After Berkeley introduced its tax, sales of sugary drinks rose by 6.9% in neighbouring cities. Denmark, which instituted a tax on fat-laden foods in 2011, ran into similar problems. The government got rid of the tax a year later when it discovered that many shoppers were buying butter in neighbouring Germany and Sweden.

Advocates of “sin” taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and sugar argue their use impose negative externalities on the public, since governments have to spend more to take care of sick people. With approximately one-third of the U.S. population covered by some form of government funded health insurance, such as Medicare or Medicaid, what were once private costs of healthcare have been transformed into a public cost.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in U.S., smoking-related illness in the U.S. costs more than $300 billion each year, including; (1) nearly $170 billion for direct medical care for adults and (2) more than $156 billion in lost productivity, including $5.6 billion in lost productivity due to secondhand smoke exposure.

On the other hand, The Economist points out:

Smoking, in contrast, probably saves taxpayers money. Lifelong smoking will bring forward a person’s death by about ten years, which means that smokers tend to die just as they would start drawing from state pensions. In a study published in 2002 Kip Viscusi, an economist at Vanderbilt University who has served as an expert witness on behalf of tobacco companies, estimated that even if tobacco were untaxed, Americans could still expect to save the government an average of 32 cents for every pack of cigarettes they smoke.

The CDC’s cost estimates raise important questions regarding who bears the burden of smoking related illness. For example, much of the direct cost is borne by private insurance, which charge steeper premiums for customers who smoke. In addition, the CDC estimates reflect costs imposed by people who have smoked for decades—many of whom have now quit. A proper accounting of the costs vis-à-vis tax policy should evaluate the discounted costs imposed by today’s smokers.

State and local governments in the U.S. collect more than $18 billion a year in tobacco taxes. While some jurisdictions earmark a portion of tobacco taxes for prevention and cessation efforts, in practice most tobacco taxes are treated by policymakers as general revenues to be spent in whatever way the legislative body determines. Thus, in practice, there is no clear nexus between taxes levied on tobacco and government’s use of the tax revenues on smoking related costs.

Most of the harm from smoking is caused by the inhalation of toxicants released through the combustion of tobacco. Public Health England and the American Cancer Society have concluded non-combustible tobacco products, such as e-cigarettes, “heat-not-burn” products, smokeless tobacco, are considerably less harmful than combustible products.

Many experts believe that the best option for smokers who are unable or unwilling to quit smoking is to switch to a less harmful alternative activity that has similar attributes, such as using non-combustible nicotine delivery products. Policies that encourage smokers to switch from more harmful combustible tobacco products to less harmful non-combustible products would be considered a form of “harm reduction.”

Nine U.S. states now have taxes on vapor products. In addition, several local jurisdictions have enacted taxes. Their methods and levels of taxation vary widely. Policy makers considering a tax on vapor products should account for the following factors.

  • The current market for e-cigarettes as well as heat-not-burn products in the range of 0-10 percent of the cigarette market. Given the relatively small size of the e-cigarette and heated tobacco product market, it is unlikely any level of taxation of e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products would generate significant tax revenues to the taxing jurisdiction. Moreover much of the current research likely represents early adopters and higher income consumer groups. As such, the current empirical data based on total market size and price/tax levels are likely to be far from indicative of the “actual” market for these products.
  • The demand for e-cigarettes is much more responsive to a change in price than the demand for combustible cigarettes. My review of the published research to date finds the median estimated own-price elasticity is -1.096, meaning something close to a 1-to-1 relationship: a tax resulting in a one percent increase in e-cigarette prices would be associated with one percent decline in e-cigarette sales. Many of those lost sales would be shifted to purchases of combustible cigarettes.
  • Research on the price responsiveness of vapor products is relatively new and sparse. There are fewer than a dozen published articles, and the first article was published in 2014. As a result, the literature reports a wide range of estimated elasticities that calls into question the reliability of published estimates, as shown in the figure below. As a relatively unformed area of research, the policy debate would benefit from additional research that involves larger samples with better statistical power, reflects the dynamic nature of this new product category, and accounts for the wide variety of vapor products.

 

With respect to taxation and pricing, policymakers would benefit from reliable information regarding the size of the vapor product market and the degree to which vapor products are substitutes for combustible tobacco products. It may turn out that a tax on vapor products may be, as The Economist notes, less efficient than they look.

In Health Care, Health Insurance, International, Regulation, Taxes, Truth on the Market , , , , ,
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Correcting the Federalist Society Review’s Mischaracterization of How to Regulate

Thom Lambert —  9 July 2018

Ours is not an age of nuance.  It’s an age of tribalism, of teams—“Yer either fer us or agin’ us!”  Perhaps I should have been less surprised, then, when I read the unfavorable review of my book How to Regulate in, of all places, the Federalist Society Review.

I had expected some positive feedback from reviewer J. Kennerly Davis, a contributor to the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project.  The “About” section of the Project’s website states:

In the ultra-complex and interconnected digital age in which we live, government must issue and enforce regulations to protect public health and safety.  However, despite the best of intentions, government regulation can fail, stifle innovation, foreclose opportunity, and harm the most vulnerable among us.  It is for precisely these reasons that we must be diligent in reviewing how our policies either succeed or fail us, and think about how we might improve them.

I might not have expressed these sentiments in such pro-regulation terms.  For example, I don’t think government should regulate, even “to protect public health and safety,” absent (1) a market failure and (2) confidence that systematic governmental failures won’t cause the cure to be worse than the disease.  I agree, though, that regulation is sometimes appropriate, that government interventions often fail (in systematic ways), and that regulatory policies should regularly be reviewed with an eye toward reducing the combined costs of market and government failures.

Those are, in fact, the central themes of How to Regulate.  The book sets forth an overarching goal for regulation (minimize the sum of error and decision costs) and then catalogues, for six oft-cited bases for regulating, what regulatory tools are available to policymakers and how each may misfire.  For every possible intervention, the book considers the potential for failure from two sources—the knowledge problem identified by F.A. Hayek and public choice concerns (rent-seeking, regulatory capture, etc.).  It ends up arguing:

  • for property rights-based approaches to environmental protection (versus the command-and-control status quo);
  • for increased reliance on the private sector to produce public goods;
  • that recognizing property rights, rather than allocating usage, is the best way to address the tragedy of the commons;
  • that market-based mechanisms, not shareholder suits and mandatory structural rules like those imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank, are the best way to constrain agency costs in the corporate context;
  • that insider trading restrictions should be left to corporations themselves;
  • that antitrust law should continue to evolve in the consumer welfare-focused direction Robert Bork recommended;
  • against the FCC’s recently abrogated net neutrality rules;
  • that occupational licensure is primarily about rent-seeking and should be avoided;
  • that incentives for voluntary disclosure will usually obviate the need for mandatory disclosure to correct information asymmetry;
  • that the claims of behavioral economics do not justify paternalistic policies to protect people from themselves; and
  • that “libertarian-paternalism” is largely a ruse that tends to morph into hard paternalism.

Given the congruence of my book’s prescriptions with the purported aims of the Regulatory Transparency Project—not to mention the laundry list of specific market-oriented policies the book advocates—I had expected a generally positive review from Mr. Davis (whom I sincerely thank for reading and reviewing the book; book reviews are a ton of work).

I didn’t get what I’d expected.  Instead, Mr. Davis denounced my book for perpetuating “progressive assumptions about state and society” (“wrongheaded” assumptions, the editor’s introduction notes).  He responded to my proposed methodology with a “meh,” noting that it “is not clearly better than the status quo.”  His one compliment, which I’ll gladly accept, was that my discussion of economic theory was “generally accessible.”

Following are a few thoughts on Mr. Davis’s critiques.

Are My Assumptions Progressive?

According to Mr. Davis, my book endorses three progressive concepts:

(i) the idea that market based arrangements among private parties routinely misallocate resources, (ii) the idea that government policymakers are capable of formulating executive directives that can correct private ordering market failures and optimize the allocation of resources, and (iii) the idea that the welfare of society is actually something that exists separate and apart from the individual welfare of each of the members of society.

I agree with Mr. Davis that these are progressive ideas.  If my book embraced them, it might be fair to label it “progressive.”  But it doesn’t.  Not one of them.

  1. Market Failure

Nothing in my book suggests that “market based arrangements among private parties routinely misallocate resources.”  I do say that “markets sometimes fail to work well,” and I explain how, in narrow sets of circumstances, market failures may emerge.  Understanding exactly what may happen in those narrow sets of circumstances helps to identify the least restrictive option for addressing problems and would thus would seem a pre-requisite to effective policymaking for a conservative or libertarian.  My mere invocation of the term “market failure,” however, was enough for Mr. Davis to kick me off the team.

Mr. Davis ignored altogether the many points where I explain how private ordering fixes situations that could lead to poor market performance.  At the end of the information asymmetry chapter, for example, I write,

This chapter has described information asymmetry as a problem, and indeed it is one.  But it can also present an opportunity for profit.  Entrepreneurs have long sought to make money—and create social value—by developing ways to correct informational imbalances and thereby facilitate transactions that wouldn’t otherwise occur.

I then describe the advent of companies like Carfax, AirBnb, and Uber, all of which offer privately ordered solutions to instances of information asymmetry that might otherwise create lemons problems.  I conclude:

These businesses thrive precisely because of information asymmetry.  By offering privately ordered solutions to the problem, they allow previously under-utilized assets to generate heretofore unrealized value.  And they enrich the people who created and financed them.  It’s a marvelous thing.

That theme—that potential market failures invite privately ordered solutions that often obviate the need for any governmental fix—permeates the book.  In the public goods chapter, I spend a great deal of time explaining how privately ordered devices like assurance contracts facilitate the production of amenities that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable.  In discussing the tragedy of the commons, I highlight Elinor Ostrom’s work showing how “groups of individuals have displayed a remarkable ability to manage commons goods effectively without either privatizing them or relying on government intervention.”  In the chapter on externalities, I spend a full seven pages explaining why Coasean bargains are more likely than most people think to prevent inefficiencies from negative externalities.  In the chapter on agency costs, I explain why privately ordered solutions like the market for corporate control would, if not precluded by some ill-conceived regulations, constrain agency costs better than structural rules from the government.

Disregarding all this, Mr. Davis chides me for assuming that “markets routinely fail.”  And, for good measure, he explains that government interventions are often a bigger source of failure, a point I repeatedly acknowledge, as it is a—perhaps the—central theme of the book.

  1. Trust in Experts

In what may be the strangest (and certainly the most misleading) part of his review, Mr. Davis criticizes me for placing too much confidence in experts by giving short shrift to the Hayekian knowledge problem and the insights of public choice.

          a.  The Knowledge Problem

According to Mr. Davis, the approach I advocate “is centered around fully functioning experts.”  He continues:

This progressive trust in experts is misplaced.  It is simply false to suppose that government policymakers are capable of formulating executive directives that effectively improve upon private arrangements and optimize the allocation of resources.  Friedrich Hayek and other classical liberals have persuasively argued, and everyday experience has repeatedly confirmed, that the information needed to allocate resources efficiently is voluminous and complex and widely dispersed.  So much so that government experts acting through top down directives can never hope to match the efficiency of resource allocation made through countless voluntary market transactions among private parties who actually possess the information needed to allocate the resources most efficiently.

Amen and hallelujah!  I couldn’t agree more!  Indeed, I said something similar when I came to the first regulatory tool my book examines (and criticizes), command-and-control pollution rules.  I wrote:

The difficulty here is an instance of a problem that afflicts regulation generally.  At the end of the day, regulating involves centralized economic planning:  A regulating “planner” mandates that productive resources be allocated away from some uses and toward others.  That requires the planner to know the relative value of different resource uses.  But such information, in the words of Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, “is not given to anyone in its totality.”  The personal preferences of thousands or millions of individuals—preferences only they know—determine whether there should be more widgets and fewer gidgets, or vice-versa.  As Hayek observed, voluntary trading among resource owners in a free market generates prices that signal how resources should be allocated (i.e., toward the uses for which resource owners may command the highest prices).  But centralized economic planners—including regulators—don’t allocate resources on the basis of relative prices.  Regulators, in fact, generally assume that prices are wrong due to the market failure the regulators are seeking to address.  Thus, the so-called knowledge problem that afflicts regulation generally is particularly acute for command-and-control approaches that require regulators to make refined judgments on the basis of information about relative costs and benefits.

That was just the first of many times I invoked the knowledge problem to argue against top-down directives and in favor of market-oriented policies that would enable individuals to harness local knowledge to which regulators would not be privy.  The index to the book includes a “knowledge problem” entry with no fewer than nine sub-entries (e.g., “with licensure regimes,” “with Pigouvian taxes,” “with mandatory disclosure regimes”).  There are undoubtedly more mentions of the knowledge problem than those listed in the index, for the book assesses the degree to which the knowledge problem creates difficulties for every regulatory approach it considers.

Mr. Davis does mention one time where I “acknowledge[] the work of Hayek” and “recognize[] that context specific information is vitally important,” but he says I miss the point:

Having conceded these critical points [about the importance of context-specific information], Professor Lambert fails to follow them to the logical conclusion that private ordering arrangements are best for regulating resources efficiently.  Instead, he stops one step short, suggesting that policymakers defer to the regulator most familiar with the regulated party when they need context-specific information for their analysis.  Professor Lambert is mistaken.  The best information for resource allocation is not to be found in the regional office of the regulator.  It resides with the persons who have long been controlled and directed by the progressive regulatory system.  These are the ones to whom policymakers should defer.

I was initially puzzled by Mr. Davis’s description of how my approach would address the knowledge problem.  It’s inconsistent with the way I described the problem (the “regional office of the regulator” wouldn’t know people’s personal preferences, etc.), and I couldn’t remember ever suggesting that regulatory devolution—delegating decisions down toward local regulators—was the solution to the knowledge problem.

When I checked the citation in the sentences just quoted, I realized that Mr. Davis had misunderstood the point I was making in the passage he cited (my own fault, no doubt, not his).  The cited passage was at the very end of the book, where I was summarizing the book’s contributions.  I claimed to have set forth a plan for selecting regulatory approaches that would minimize the sum of error and decision costs.  I wanted to acknowledge, though, the irony of promulgating a generally applicable plan for regulating in a book that, time and again, decries top-down imposition of one-size-fits-all rules.  Thus, I wrote:

A central theme of this book is that Hayek’s knowledge problem—the fact that no central planner can possess and process all the information needed to allocate resources so as to unlock their greatest possible value—applies to regulation, which is ultimately a set of centralized decisions about resource allocation.  The very knowledge problem besetting regulators’ decisions about what others should do similarly afflicts pointy-headed academics’ efforts to set forth ex ante rules about what regulators should do.  Context-specific information to which only the “regulator on the spot” is privy may call for occasional departures from the regulatory plan proposed here.

As should be obvious, my point was not that the knowledge problem can generally be fixed by regulatory devolution.  Rather, I was acknowledging that the general regulatory approach I had set forth—i.e., the rules policymakers should follow in selecting among regulatory approaches—may occasionally misfire and should thus be implemented flexibly.

           b.  Public Choice Concerns

A second problem with my purported trust in experts, Mr. Davis explains, stems from the insights of public choice:

Actual policymakers simply don’t live up to [Woodrow] Wilson’s ideal of the disinterested, objective, apolitical, expert technocrat.  To the contrary, a vast amount of research related to public choice theory has convincingly demonstrated that decisions of regulatory agencies are frequently shaped by politics, institutional self-interest and the influence of the entities the agencies regulate.

Again, huzzah!  Those words could have been lifted straight out of the three full pages of discussion I devoted to public choice concerns with the very first regulatory intervention the book considered.  A snippet from that discussion:

While one might initially expect regulators pursuing the public interest to resist efforts to manipulate regulation for private gain, that assumes that government officials are not themselves rational, self-interest maximizers.  As scholars associated with the “public choice” economic tradition have demonstrated, government officials do not shed their self-interested nature when they step into the public square.  They are often receptive to lobbying in favor of questionable rules, especially since they benefit from regulatory expansions, which tend to enhance their job status and often their incomes.  They also tend to become “captured” by powerful regulatees who may shower them with personal benefits and potentially employ them after their stints in government have ended.

That’s just a slice.  Elsewhere in those three pages, I explain (1) how the dynamic of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs allows inefficient protectionist policies to persist, (2) how firms that benefit from protectionist regulation are often assisted by “pro-social” groups that will make a public interest case for the rules (Bruce Yandle’s Bootleggers and Baptists syndrome), and (3) the “[t]wo types of losses [that] result from the sort of interest-group manipulation public choice predicts.”  And that’s just the book’s initial foray into public choice.  The entry for “public choice concerns” in the book’s index includes eight sub-entries.  As with the knowledge problem, I addressed the public choice issues that could arise from every major regulatory approach the book considered.

For Mr. Davis, though, that was not enough to keep me out of the camp of Wilsonian progressives.  He explains:

Professor Lambert devotes a good deal of attention to the problem of “agency capture” by regulated entities.  However, he fails to acknowledge that a symbiotic relationship between regulators and regulated is not a bug in the regulatory system, but an inherent feature of a system defined by extensive and continuing government involvement in the allocation of resources.

To be honest, I’m not sure what that last sentence means.  Apparently, I didn’t recite some talismanic incantation that would indicate that I really do believe public choice concerns are a big problem for regulation.  I did say this in one of the book’s many discussions of public choice:

A regulator that has both regular contact with its regulatees and significant discretionary authority over them is particularly susceptible to capture.  The regulator’s discretionary authority provides regulatees with a strong motive to win over the regulator, which has the power to hobble the regulatee’s potential rivals and protect its revenue stream.  The regular contact between the regulator and the regulatee provides the regulatee with better access to those in power than that available to parties with opposing interests.  Moreover, the regulatee’s preferred course of action is likely (1) to create concentrated benefits (to the regulatee) and diffuse costs (to consumers generally), and (2) to involve an expansion of the regulator’s authority.  The upshot is that that those who bear the cost of the preferred policy are less likely to organize against it, and regulators, who benefit from turf expansion, are more likely to prefer it.  Rate-of-return regulation thus involves the precise combination that leads to regulatory expansion at consumer expense: broad and discretionary government power, close contact between regulators and regulatees, decisions that generally involve concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and regular opportunities to expand regulators’ power and prestige.

In light of this combination of features, it should come as no surprise that the history of rate-of-return regulation is littered with instances of agency capture and regulatory expansion.

Even that was not enough to convince Mr. Davis that I reject the Wilsonian assumption of “disinterested, objective, apolitical, expert technocrat[s].”  I don’t know what more I could have said.

  1. Social Welfare

Mr. Davis is right when he says, “Professor Lambert’s ultimate goal for his book is to provide policymakers with a resource that will enable them to make regulatory decisions that produce greater social welfare.”  But nowhere in my book do I suggest, as he says I do, “that the welfare of society is actually something that exists separate and apart from the individual welfare of each of the members of society.”  What I mean by “social welfare” is the aggregate welfare of all the individuals in a society.  And I’m careful to point out that only they know what makes them better off.  (At one point, for example, I write that “[g]overnment planners have no way of knowing how much pleasure regulatees derive from banned activities…or how much displeasure they experience when they must comply with an affirmative command…. [W]ith many paternalistic policies and proposals…government planners are really just guessing about welfare effects.”)

I agree with Mr. Davis that “[t]here is no single generally accepted methodology that anyone can use to determine objectively how and to what extent the welfare of society will be affected by a particular regulatory directive.”  For that reason, nowhere in the book do I suggest any sort of “metes and bounds” measurement of social welfare.  (I certainly do not endorse the use of GDP, which Mr. Davis rightly criticizes; that term appears nowhere in the book.)

Rather than prescribing any sort of precise measurement of social welfare, my book operates at the level of general principles:  We have reasons to believe that inefficiencies may arise when conditions are thus; there is a range of potential government responses to this situation—from doing nothing, to facilitating a privately ordered solution, to mandating various actions; based on our experience with these different interventions, the likely downsides of each (stemming from, for example, the knowledge problem and public choice concerns) are so-and-so; all things considered, the aggregate welfare of the individuals within this group will probably be greatest with policy x.

It is true that the thrust of the book is consequentialist, not deontological.  But it’s a book about policy, not ethics.  And its version of consequentialism is rule, not act, utilitarianism.  Is a consequentialist approach to policymaking enough to render one a progressive?  Should we excise John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty from the classical liberal canon?  I surely hope not.

Is My Proposed Approach an Improvement?

Mr. Davis’s second major criticism of my book—that what it proposes is “just the status quo”—has more bite.  By that, I mean two things.  First, it’s a more painful criticism to receive.  It’s easier for an author to hear “you’re saying something wrong” than “you’re not saying anything new.”

Second, there may be more merit to this criticism.  As Mr. Davis observes, I noted in the book’s introduction that “[a]t times during the drafting, I … wondered whether th[e] book was ‘original’ enough.”  I ultimately concluded that it was because it “br[ought] together insights of legal theorists and economists of various stripes…and systematize[d] their ideas into a unified, practical approach to regulating.”  Mr. Davis thinks I’ve overstated the book’s value, and he may be right.

The current regulatory landscape would suggest, though, that my book’s approach to selecting among potential regulatory policies isn’t “just the status quo.”  The approach I recommend would generate the specific policies catalogued at the outset of this response (in the bullet points).  The fact that those policies haven’t been implemented under the existing regulatory approach suggests that what I’m recommending must be something different than the status quo.

Mr. Davis observes—and I acknowledge—that my recommended approach resembles the review required of major executive agency regulations under Executive Order 12866, President Clinton’s revised version of President Reagan’s Executive Order 12291.  But that order is quite limited in its scope.  It doesn’t cover “minor” executive agency rules (those with expected costs of less than $100 million) or rules from independent agencies or from Congress or from courts or at the state or local level.  Moreover, I understand from talking to a former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is charged with implementing the order, that it has actually generated little serious consideration of less restrictive alternatives, something my approach emphasizes.

What my book proposes is not some sort of governmental procedure; indeed, I emphasize in the conclusion that the book “has not addressed … how existing regulatory institutions should be reformed to encourage the sort of analysis th[e] book recommends.”  Instead, I propose a way to think through specific areas of regulation, one that is informed by a great deal of learning about both market and government failures.  The best audience for the book is probably law students who will someday find themselves influencing public policy as lawyers, legislators, regulators, or judges.  I am thus heartened that the book is being used as a text at several law schools.  My guess is that few law students receive significant exposure to Hayek, public choice, etc.

So, who knows?  Perhaps the book will make a difference at the margin.  Or perhaps it will amount to sound and fury, signifying nothing.  But I don’t think a classical liberal could fairly say that the analysis it counsels “is not clearly better than the status quo.”

A Truly Better Approach to Regulating

Mr. Davis ends his review with a stirring call to revamp the administrative state to bring it “in complete and consistent compliance with the fundamental law of our republic embodied in the Constitution, with its provisions interpreted to faithfully conform to their original public meaning.”  Among other things, he calls for restoring the separation of powers, which has been erased in agencies that combine legislative, executive, and judicial functions, and for eliminating unchecked government power, which results when the legislature delegates broad rulemaking and adjudicatory authority to politically unaccountable bureaucrats.

Once again, I concur.  There are major problems—constitutional and otherwise—with the current state of administrative law and procedure.  I’d be happy to tear down the existing administrative state and begin again on a constitutionally constrained tabula rasa.

But that’s not what my book was about.  I deliberately set out to write a book about the substance of regulation, not the process by which rules should be imposed.  I took that tack for two reasons.  First, there are numerous articles and books, by scholars far more expert than I, on the structure of the administrative state.  I could add little value on administrative process.

Second, the less-addressed substantive question—what, as a substantive matter, should a policy addressing x do?—would exist even if Mr. Davis’s constitutionally constrained regulatory process were implemented.  Suppose that we got rid of independent agencies, curtailed delegations of rulemaking authority to the executive branch, and returned to a system in which Congress wrote all rules, the executive branch enforced them, and the courts resolved any disputes.  Someone would still have to write the rule, and that someone (or group of people) should have some sense of the pros and cons of one approach over another.  That is what my book seeks to provide.

A hard core Hayekian—one who had immersed himself in Law, Legislation, and Liberty—might respond that no one should design regulation (purposive rules that Hayek would call thesis) and that efficient, “purpose-independent” laws (what Hayek called nomos) will just emerge as disputes arise.  But that is not Mr. Davis’s view.  He writes:

A system of governance or regulation based on the rule of law attains its policy objectives by proscribing actions that are inconsistent with those objectives.  For example, this type of regulation would prohibit a regulated party from discharging a pollutant in any amount greater than the limiting amount specified in the regulation.  Under this proscriptive approach to regulation, any and all actions not specifically prohibited are permitted.

Mr. Davis has thus contemplated a purposive rule, crafted by someone.  That someone should know the various policy options and the upsides and downsides of each.  How to Regulate could help.

Conclusion

I’m not sure why Mr. Davis viewed my book as no more than dressed-up progressivism.  Maybe he was triggered by the book’s cover art, which he says “is faithful to the progressive tradition,” resembling “the walls of public buildings from San Francisco to Stalingrad.”  Maybe it was a case of Sunstein Derangement Syndrome.  (Progressive legal scholar Cass Sunstein had nice things to say about the book, despite its criticisms of a number of his ideas.)  Or perhaps it was that I used the term “market failure.”  Many conservatives and libertarians fear, with good reason, that conceding the existence of market failures invites all sorts of government meddling.

At the end of the day, though, I believe we classical liberals should stop pretending that market outcomes are always perfect, that pure private ordering is always and everywhere the best policy.  We should certainly sing markets’ praises; they usually work so well that people don’t even notice them, and we should point that out.  We should continually remind people that government interventions also fail—and in systematic ways (e.g., the knowledge problem and public choice concerns).  We should insist that a market failure is never a sufficient condition for a governmental fix; one must always consider whether the cure will be worse than the disease.  In short, we should take and promote the view that government should operate “under a presumption of error.”

That view, economist Aaron Director famously observed, is the essence of laissez faire.  It’s implicit in the purpose statement of the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project.  And it’s the central point of How to Regulate.

So let’s go easy on the friendly fire.

In Administrative Law, Amazon, Constitutional Law, Corporate & Securities Law, Economic Theory, Law & Economics, Net Neutrality, Platforms, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Taxes, Telecommunications , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Do biased stats provide bogus economics? A primer on publication bias and power

Eric Fruits —  29 March 2018

If you do research involving statistical analysis, you’ve heard of John Ioannidis. If you haven’t heard of him, you will. He’s gone after the fields of medicine, psychology, and economics. He may be coming for your field next.

Ioannidis is after bias in research. He is perhaps best known for a 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” A professor at Stanford, he has built a career in the field of meta-research and may be one of the most highly cited researchers alive.

In 2017, he published “The Power of Bias in Economics Research.” He recently talked to Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast about his research and what it means for economics.

He focuses on two factors that contribute to bias in economics research: publication bias and low power. These are complicated topics. This post hopes to provide a simplified explanation of these issues and why bias and power matters.

What is bias?

We frequently hear the word bias. “Fake news” is biased news. For dinner, I am biased toward steak over chicken. That’s different from statistical bias.

In statistics, bias means that a researcher’s estimate of a variable or effect is different from the “true” value or effect. The “true” probability of getting heads from tossing a fair coin is 50 percent. Let’s say that no matter how many times I toss a particular coin, I find that I’m getting heads about 75 percent of the time. My instrument, the coin, may be biased. I may be the most honest coin flipper, but my experiment has biased results. In other words, biased results do not imply biased research or biased researchers.

Publication bias

Publication bias occurs because peer-reviewed publications tend to favor publishing positive, statistically significant results and to reject insignificant results. Informally, this is known as the “file drawer” problem. Nonsignificant results remain unsubmitted in the researcher’s file drawer or, if submitted, remain in limbo in an editor’s file drawer.

Studies are more likely to be published in peer-reviewed publications if they have statistically significant findings, build on previous published research, and can potentially garner citations for the journal with sensational findings. Studies that don’t have statistically significant findings or don’t build on previous research are less likely to be published.

The importance of “sensational” findings means that ho-hum findings—even if statistically significant—are less likely to be published. For example, research finding that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is associated with a one-tenth of 1 percent reduction in employment (i.e., an elasticity of 0.01) would be less likely to be published than a study finding a 3 percent reduction in employment (i.e., elasticity of –0.3).

“Man bites dog” findings—those that are counterintuitive or contradict previously published research—may be less likely to be published. A study finding an upward sloping demand curve is likely to be rejected because economists “know” demand curves slope downward.

On the other hand, man bites dog findings may also be more likely to be published. Card and Krueger’s 1994 study finding that a minimum wage hike was associated with an increase in low-wage workers was published in the top-tier American Economic Review. Had the study been conducted by lesser-known economists, it’s much less likely it would have been accepted for publication. The results were sensational, judging from the attention the article got from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and even the Clinton administration. Sometimes a man does bite a dog.

Low power

A study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect.

Consider our criminal legal system. We seek to find criminals guilty, while ensuring the innocent go free. Using the language of statistical testing, the presumption of innocence is our null hypothesis. We set a high threshold for our test: Innocent until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt. We hypothesize innocence and only after overcoming our reasonable doubt do we reject that hypothesis.

Type1-Type2-Error

An innocent person found guilty is considered a serious error—a “miscarriage of justice.” The presumption of innocence (null hypothesis) combined with a high burden of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) are designed to reduce these errors. In statistics, this is known as “Type I” error, or “false positive.” The probability of a Type I error is called alpha, which is set to some arbitrarily low number, like 10 percent, 5 percent, or 1 percent.

Failing to convict a known criminal is also a serious error, but generally agreed it’s less serious than a wrongful conviction. Statistically speaking, this is a “Type II” error or “false negative” and the probability of making a Type II error is beta.

By now, it should be clear there’s a relationship between Type I and Type II errors. If we reduce the chance of a wrongful conviction, we are going to increase the chance of letting some criminals go free. It can be mathematically shown (not here), that a reduction in the probability of Type I error is associated with an increase in Type II error.

Consider O.J. Simpson. Simpson was not found guilty in his criminal trial for murder, but was found liable for the deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman in a civil trial. One reason for these different outcomes is the higher burden of proof for a criminal conviction (“beyond a reasonable doubt,” alpha = 1 percent) than for a finding of civil liability (“preponderance of evidence,” alpha = 50 percent). If O.J. truly is guilty of the murders, the criminal trial would have been less likely to find guilt than the civil trial would.

In econometrics, we construct the null hypothesis to be the opposite of what we hypothesize to be the relationship. For example, if we hypothesize that an increase in the minimum wage decreases employment, the null hypothesis would be: “A change in the minimum wage has no impact on employment.” If the research involves regression analysis, the null hypothesis would be: “The estimated coefficient on the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage would be zero.” If we set the probability of Type I error to 5 percent, then regression results with a p-value of less than 0.05 would be sufficient to reject the null hypothesis of no relationship. If we increase the probability of Type I error, we increase the likelihood of finding a relationship, but we also increase the chance of finding a relationship when none exists.

Now, we’re getting to power.

Power is the chance of detecting a true effect. In the legal system, it would be the probability that a truly guilty person is found guilty.

By definition, a low power study has a small chance of discovering a relationship that truly exists. Low power studies produce more false negative than high power studies. If a set of studies have a power of 20 percent, then if we know that there are 100 actual effects, the studies will find only 20 of them. In other words, out of 100 truly guilty suspects, a legal system with a power of 20 percent will find only 20 of them guilty.

Suppose we expect 25 percent of those accused of a crime are truly guilty of the crime. Thus the odds of guilt are R = 0.25 / 0.75 = 0.33. Assume we set alpha to 0.05, and conclude the accused is guilty if our test statistic provides p < 0.05. Using Ioannidis’ formula for positive predictive value, we find:

  • If the power of the test is 20 percent, the probability that a “guilty” verdict reflects true guilt is 57 percent.
  • If the power of the test is 80 percent, the probability that a “guilty” verdict reflects true guilt is 84 percent.

In other words, a low power test is more likely to convict the innocent than a high power test.

In our minimum wage example, a low power study is more likely find a relationship between a change in the minimum wage and employment when no relationship truly exists. By extension, even if a relationship truly exists, a low power study would be more likely to find a bigger impact than a high power study. The figure below demonstrates this phenomenon.

MinimumWageResearchFunnelGraph

Across the 1,424 studies surveyed, the average elasticity with respect to the minimum wage is –0.190 (i.e., a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage would be associated with a 1.9 percent decrease in employment). When adjusted for the studies’ precision, the weighted average elasticity is –0.054. By this simple analysis, the unadjusted average is 3.5 times bigger than the adjusted average. Ioannidis and his coauthors estimate among the 60 studies with “adequate” power, the weighted average elasticity is –0.011.

(By the way, my own unpublished studies of minimum wage impacts at the state level had an estimated short-run elasticity of –0.03 and “precision” of 122 for Oregon and short-run elasticity of –0.048 and “precision” of 259 for Colorado. These results are in line with the more precise studies in the figure above.)

Is economics bogus?

It’s tempting to walk away from this discussion thinking all of econometrics is bogus. Ioannidis himself responds to this temptation:

Although the discipline has gotten a bad rap, economics can be quite reliable and trustworthy. Where evidence is deemed unreliable, we need more investment in the science of economics, not less.

For policymakers, the reliance on economic evidence is even more important, according to Ioannidis:

[P]oliticians rarely use economic science to make decisions and set new laws. Indeed, it is scary how little science informs political choices on a global scale. Those who decide the world’s economic fate typically have a weak scientific background or none at all.

Ioannidis and his colleagues identify several way to address the reliability problems in economics and other fields—social psychology is one of the worst. However these are longer term solutions.

In the short term, researchers and policymakers should view sensational finding with skepticism, especially if those sensational findings support their own biases. That skepticism should begin with one simple question: “What’s the confidence interval?”

 

In Platforms, Truth on the Market , , , , , ,
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Fred S. McChesney In Memoriam: Honorable Man and Incisive Scholar

Richard Epstein —  8 November 2017

Richard Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, the Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

It was with much sadness that I learned of the all-too-early death of Fred McChesney, whom I have known since the time that he spent at the University of Chicago Law School in the early 1980s when he visited on our faculty. At the time, Fred was at the peak of his powers and he displayed a legal imagination and economic sophistication that few have been able to match, either before or since. Fred’s great skill was being able to take a tough-minded public choice perspective to just about any mundane problem that one might encounter, and then give the entire issue a spin that seemed improbable but made sense. In conversation he was a fount of intellectual energy who had an endless curiosity, and who exhibited a palpable sense of excitement whenever the discussion took an unexpected turn into unknown territory. Those were heady days together, and I still remember the many discussions that we had about Volunteer Fire Fighting in the Nineteenth Century and the wonderful article on the topic that he published with me in the Journal of Legal Studies. I am still grateful over 30 years later for the opportunity to work closely with him during his all too short stay at the University of Chicago.

Fred was a man of exceptionable energy and character.  But there was always a powerful disjunction between the way he carried himself, and the way in which he thought about the larger economic issues that dominated his intellectual life. Fred was not a man for needless subtlety in dealing with human nature. He was always one of the kindest and most communicative of colleagues, but he well understood that while these personal virtues have a great deal to do with the way in which good and honorable people lead their lives, they have far less to do with the way in which various actors, both private and public, act when their function in the political arena, where the stakes are far higher, and their own personal livelihood and success is on the table. In these settings, Fred was of the general view that the fine points washed out, and the dangers of factional politics loomed larger.  

Let me give one example. In his book Money for Nothing, the title expresses with his usual bluntness the dangers that he saw in public affairs. I am happy to report that I was still the editor of the Journal of Legal studies in 1987 when Fred published his widely-cited article Rent Extraction and Recreation Creation in the Economic Theory of Regulation. Like all great articles, Fred’s contribution in this paper had one great idea that seems obvious once it is stated, even if it had never been stated before. Fred well knew that the standard theory of regulation was how well-organized interest groups could pull the political levers in order to gain special favors from the government. He was indeed an ardent believer that actions like that did and could take place on a common basis. But Fred saw that the extraction game was a two-way street. The well-organized group that could extract benefits was also subject to extraction itself—precisely because it was so well organized. Politicians were aware of these possibilities and thus could propose what were called “milker bills” which threatened to impose taxes or regulations on a well-organized firm or industry unless they came across with some campaign contribution, direct or indirect, to the political power groups. Being well organized was a double-edged sword. Once the point is made it cannot be forgotten. The potential domain of political bargains does not have $0 as a lower bound. The payments in question can go in both directions.

Once this simple point is seen, the entire fabric of political negotiation has an extra dimension that we ignore at our peril. The use of this tool helped explain why Fred, with good reason, was so skeptical of so much of behavioral economics. The forces that he was talking about were so pervasive and so powerful that it is hardly likely that they could be displaced by behavioral anomalies, which, if they exist at all, are first found in the laboratory and then are rarely observed in nature. Fred was fond of saying that the behavioral issues were at best a second-order issue, an epicycle on the basic rational choice theory, upon which he was able to deploy neoclassical tools so effectively to explain away many of the more dramatic findings in a 2013 recent article that treated the subject as dealing with “Old Wine in Irrelevant New Bottles.”

Speaking about Fred’s affection with public choice does not negate his many other skills. When I taught antitrust law once some years ago, I gravitated to the book, now in its Fifth Edition, that Fred had prepared with Charles Goetz, which dealt with antitrust law, its interpretation and implementation. The book was an ideal teaching tool, for it understood that it was important to deal with the historical evolution of antitrust law along with its neoclassical foundations in economic theory. Teaching from the book was a pleasure, learning from it was a greater pleasure still.

It is a source of some comfort that Fred remained intellectually active throughout his entire career. It is a source of much sadness to know that he is no longer with us. May his memory be a blessing.

In Amazon, Economic Theory, Platforms, Taxes ,
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How Uber uses innovative management tactics to incentivize its drivers: A critical commentary on Noam Scheiber’s “How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons”

Geoffrey Manne —  5 April 2017

In a recent long-form article in the New York Times, reporter Noam Scheiber set out to detail some of the ways Uber (and similar companies, but mainly Uber) are engaged in “an extraordinary experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice an independent work force to maximize its growth.”

That characterization seems innocuous enough, but it is apparent early on that Scheiber’s aim is not only to inform but also, if not primarily, to deride these efforts. The title of the piece, in fact, sets the tone:

How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons

Uber and its relationship with its drivers are variously described by Scheiber in the piece as secretive, coercive, manipulative, dominating, and exploitative, among other things. As Schreiber describes his article, it sets out to reveal how

even as Uber talks up its determination to treat drivers more humanely, it is engaged in an extraordinary behind-the-scenes experiment in behavioral science to manipulate them in the service of its corporate growth — an effort whose dimensions became evident in interviews with several dozen current and former Uber officials, drivers and social scientists, as well as a review of behavioral research.

What’s so galling about the piece is that, if you strip away the biased and frequently misguided framing, it presents a truly engaging picture of some of the ways that Uber sets about solving a massively complex optimization problem, abetted by significant agency costs.

So I did. Strip away the detritus, add essential (but omitted) context, and edit the article to fix the anti-Uber bias, the one-sided presentation, the mischaracterizations, and the fundamentally non-economic presentation of what is, at its core, a fascinating illustration of some basic problems (and solutions) from industrial organization economics. (For what it’s worth, Scheiber should know better. After all, “He holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and undergraduate degrees in math and economics from Tulane University.”)

In my retelling, the title becomes:

How Uber Uses Innovative Management Tactics to Incentivize Its Drivers

My transformed version of the piece, with critical commentary in the form of tracked changes to the original, is here (pdf).

It’s a long (and, as I said, fundamentally interesting) piece, with cool interactive graphics, well worth the read (well, at least in my retelling, IMHO). Below is just a taste of the edits and commentary I added.

For example, where Scheiber writes:

Uber exists in a kind of legal and ethical purgatory, however. Because its drivers are independent contractors, they lack most of the protections associated with employment. By mastering their workers’ mental circuitry, Uber and the like may be taking the economy back toward a pre-New Deal era when businesses had enormous power over workers and few checks on their ability to exploit it.

With my commentary (here integrated into final form rather than tracked), that paragraph becomes:

Uber operates under a different set of legal constraints, however, also duly enacted and under which millions of workers have profitably worked for decades. Because its drivers are independent contractors, they receive their compensation largely in dollars rather than government-mandated “benefits” that remove some of the voluntariness from employer/worker relationships. And, in the case of overtime pay, for example, the Uber business model that is built in part on offering flexible incentives to match supply and demand using prices and compensation, would be next to impossible. It is precisely through appealing to drivers’ self-interest that Uber and the like may be moving the economy forward to a new era when businesses and workers have more flexibility, much to the benefit of all.

Elsewhere, Scheiber’s bias is a bit more subtle, but no less real. Thus, he writes:

As he tried to log off at 7:13 a.m. on New Year’s Day last year, Josh Streeter, then an Uber driver in the Tampa, Fla., area, received a message on the company’s driver app with the headline “Make it to $330.” The text then explained: “You’re $10 away from making $330 in net earnings. Are you sure you want to go offline?” Below were two prompts: “Go offline” and “Keep driving.” The latter was already highlighted.

With my edits and commentary, that paragraph becomes:

As he started the process of logging off at 7:13 a.m. on New Year’s Day last year, Josh Streeter, then an Uber driver in the Tampa, Fla., area, received a message on the company’s driver app with the headline “Make it to $330.” The text then explained: “You’re $10 away from making $330 in net earnings. Are you sure you want to go offline?” Below were two prompts: “Go offline” and “Keep driving.” The latter was already highlighted, but the former was listed first. It’s anyone’s guess whether either characteristic — placement or coloring — had any effect on drivers’ likelihood of clicking one button or the other.

And one last example. Scheiber writes:

Consider an algorithm called forward dispatch — Lyft has a similar one — that dispatches a new ride to a driver before the current one ends. Forward dispatch shortens waiting times for passengers, who may no longer have to wait for a driver 10 minutes away when a second driver is dropping off a passenger two minutes away.

Perhaps no less important, forward dispatch causes drivers to stay on the road substantially longer during busy periods — a key goal for both companies.

Uber and Lyft explain this in essentially the same way. “Drivers keep telling us the worst thing is when they’re idle for a long time,” said Kevin Fan, the director of product at Lyft. “If it’s slow, they’re going to go sign off. We want to make sure they’re constantly busy.”

While this is unquestionably true, there is another way to think of the logic of forward dispatch: It overrides self-control.

* * *

Uber officials say the feature initially produced so many rides at times that drivers began to experience a chronic Netflix ailment — the inability to stop for a bathroom break. Amid the uproar, Uber introduced a pause button.

“Drivers were saying: ‘I can never go offline. I’m on just continuous trips. This is a problem.’ So we redesigned it,” said Maya Choksi, a senior Uber official in charge of building products that help drivers. “In the middle of the trip, you can say, ‘Stop giving me requests.’ So you can have more control over when you want to stop driving.”

It is true that drivers can pause the services’ automatic queuing feature if they need to refill their tanks, or empty them, as the case may be. Yet once they log back in and accept their next ride, the feature kicks in again. To disable it, they would have to pause it every time they picked up a new passenger. By contrast, even Netflix allows users to permanently turn off its automatic queuing feature, known as Post-Play.

This pre-emptive hard-wiring can have a huge influence on behavior, said David Laibson, the chairman of the economics department at Harvard and a leading behavioral economist. Perhaps most notably, as Ms. Rosenblat and Luke Stark observed in an influential paper on these practices, Uber’s app does not let drivers see where a passenger is going before accepting the ride, making it hard to judge how profitable a trip will be.

Here’s how I would recast that, and add some much-needed economics:

Consider an algorithm called forward dispatch — Lyft has a similar one — that dispatches a new ride to a driver before the current one ends. Forward dispatch shortens waiting times for passengers, who may no longer have to wait for a driver 10 minutes away when a second driver is dropping off a passenger two minutes away.

Perhaps no less important, forward dispatch causes drivers to stay on the road substantially longer during busy periods — a key goal for both companies — by giving them more income-earning opportunities.

Uber and Lyft explain this in essentially the same way. “Drivers keep telling us the worst thing is when they’re idle for a long time,” said Kevin Fan, the director of product at Lyft. “If it’s slow, they’re going to go sign off. We want to make sure they’re constantly busy.”

While this is unquestionably true, and seems like another win-win, some critics have tried to paint even this means of satisfying both driver and consumer preferences in a negative light by claiming that the forward dispatch algorithm overrides self-control.

* * *

Uber officials say the feature initially produced so many rides at times that drivers began to experience a chronic Netflix ailment — the inability to stop for a bathroom break. Amid the uproar, Uber introduced a pause button.

“Drivers were saying: ‘I can never go offline. I’m on just continuous trips. This is a problem.’ So we redesigned it,” said Maya Choksi, a senior Uber official in charge of building products that help drivers. “In the middle of the trip, you can say, ‘Stop giving me requests.’ So you can have more control over when you want to stop driving.”

Tweaks like these put paid to the arguments that Uber is simply trying to abuse its drivers. And yet, critics continue to make such claims:

It is true that drivers can pause the services’ automatic queuing feature if they need to refill their tanks, or empty them, as the case may be. Yet once they log back in and accept their next ride, the feature kicks in again. To disable it, they would have to pause it every time they picked up a new passenger. By contrast, even Netflix allows users to permanently turn off its automatic queuing feature, known as Post-Play.

It’s difficult to take seriously claims that Uber “abuses” drivers by setting a default that drivers almost certainly prefer; surely drivers seek out another fare following the last fare more often than they seek out another bathroom break. In any case, the difference between one default and the other is a small change in the number of times drivers might have to push a single button; hardly a huge impediment.

But such claims persist, nevertheless. Setting a trivially different default can have a huge influence on behavior, claims David Laibson, the chairman of the economics department at Harvard and a leading behavioral economist. Perhaps most notably — and to change the subject — as Ms. Rosenblat and Luke Stark observed in an influential paper on these practices, Uber’s app does not let drivers see where a passenger is going before accepting the ride, making it hard to judge how profitable a trip will be. But there are any number of defenses of this practice, from both a driver- and consumer-welfare standpoint. Not least, such disclosure could well create isolated scarcity for a huge range of individual ride requests (as opposed to the general scarcity during a “surge”), leading to longer wait times, the need to adjust prices for consumers on the basis of individual rides, and more intense competition among drivers for the most profitable rides. Given these and other explanations, it is extremely unlikely that the practice is actually aimed at “abusing” drivers.

As they say, read the whole thing!

In Corporate & Securities Law , , , , , , , , , ,
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Understanding ownership and property in the Digital Age

Geoffrey Manne & Neil Turkewitz —  22 March 2017

What does it mean to “own” something? A simple question (with a complicated answer, of course) that, astonishingly, goes unasked in a recent article in the Pennsylvania Law Review entitled, What We Buy When We “Buy Now,” by Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Hoofnagle (hereafter “P&H”). But how can we reasonably answer the question they pose without first trying to understand the nature of property interests?

P&H set forth a simplistic thesis for their piece: when an e-commerce site uses the term “buy” to indicate the purchase of digital media (instead of the term “license”), it deceives consumers. This is so, the authors assert, because the common usage of the term “buy” indicates that there will be some conveyance of property that necessarily includes absolute rights such as alienability, descendibility, and excludability, and digital content doesn’t generally come with these attributes. The authors seek to establish this deception through a poorly constructed survey regarding consumers’ understanding of the parameters of their property interests in digitally acquired copies. (The survey’s considerable limitations is a topic for another day….)

The issue is more than merely academic: NTIA and the USPTO have just announced that they will hold a public meeting

to discuss how best to communicate to consumers regarding license terms and restrictions in connection with online transactions involving copyrighted works… [as a precursor to] the creation of a multistakeholder process to establish best practices to improve consumers’ understanding of license terms and restrictions in connection with online transactions involving creative works.

Whatever the results of that process, it should not begin, or end, with P&H’s problematic approach.

Getting to their conclusion that platforms are engaged in deceptive practices requires two leaps of faith: First, that property interests are absolute and that any restraint on the use of “property” is inconsistent with the notion of ownership; and second, that consumers’ stated expectations (even assuming that they were measured correctly) alone determine the appropriate contours of legal (and economic) property interests. Both leaps are meritless.

Property and ownership are not absolute concepts

P&H are in such a rush to condemn downstream restrictions on the alienability of digital copies that they fail to recognize that “property” and “ownership” are not absolute terms, and are capable of being properly understood only contextually. Our very notions of what objects may be capable of ownership change over time, along with the scope of authority over owned objects. For P&H, the fact that there are restrictions on the use of an object means that it is not properly “owned.” But that overlooks our everyday understanding of the nature of property.

Ownership is far more complex than P&H allow, and ownership limited by certain constraints is still ownership. As Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz note in The Property Right Paradigm (1973):

In common speech, we frequently speak of someone owning this land, that house, or these bonds. This conversational style undoubtedly is economical from the viewpoint of quick communication, but it masks the variety and complexity of the ownership relationship. What is owned are rights to use resources, including one’s body and mind, and these rights are always circumscribed, often by the prohibition of certain actions. To “own land” usually means to have the right to till (or not to till) the soil, to mine the soil, to offer those rights for sale, etc., but not to have the right to throw soil at a passerby, to use it to change the course of a stream, or to force someone to buy it. What are owned are socially recognized rights of action. (Emphasis added).

Literally, everything we own comes with a range of limitations on our use rights. Literally. Everything. So starting from a position that limitations on use mean something is not, in fact, owned, is absurd.

Moreover, in defining what we buy when we buy digital goods by reference to analog goods, P&H are comparing apples and oranges, without acknowledging that both apples and oranges are bought.

There has been a fair amount of discussion about the nature of digital content transactions (including by the USPTO and NTIA), and whether they are analogous to traditional sales of objects or more properly characterized as licenses. But this is largely a distinction without a difference, and the nature of the transaction is unnecessary in understanding that P&H’s assertion of deception is unwarranted.

Quite simply, we are accustomed to buying licenses as well as products. Whenever we buy a ticket — e.g., an airline ticket or a ticket to the movies — we are buying the right to use something or gain some temporary privilege. These transactions are governed by the terms of the license. But we certainly buy tickets, no? Alchian and Demsetz again:

The domain of demarcated uses of a resource can be partitioned among several people. More than one party can claim some ownership interest in the same resource. One party may own the right to till the land, while another, perhaps the state, may own an easement to traverse or otherwise use the land for specific purposes. It is not the resource itself which is owned; it is a bundle, or a portion, of rights to use a resource that is owned. In its original meaning, property referred solely to a right, title, or interest, and resources could not be identified as property any more than they could be identified as right, title, or interest. (Emphasis added).

P&H essentially assert that restrictions on the use of property are so inconsistent with the notion of property that it would be deceptive to describe the acquisition transaction as a purchase. But such a claim completely overlooks the fact that there are restrictions on any use of property in general, and on ownership of copies of copyright-protected materials in particular.

Take analog copies of copyright-protected works. While the lawful owner of a copy is able to lend that copy to a friend, sell it, or even use it as a hammer or paperweight, he or she can not offer it for rental (for certain kinds of works), cannot reproduce it, may not publicly perform or broadcast it, and may not use it to bludgeon a neighbor. In short, there are all kinds of restrictions on the use of said object — yet P&H have little problem with defining the relationship of person to object as “ownership.”

Consumers’ understanding of all the terms of exchange is a poor metric for determining the nature of property interests

P&H make much of the assertion that most users don’t “know” the precise terms that govern the allocation of rights in digital copies; this is the source of the “deception” they assert. But there is a cost to marking out the precise terms of use with perfect specificity (no contract specifies every eventuality), a cost to knowing the terms perfectly, and a cost to caring about them.

When we buy digital goods, we probably care a great deal about a few terms. For a digital music file, for example, we care first and foremost about whether it will play on our device(s). Other terms are of diminishing importance. Users certainly care whether they can play a song when offline, for example, but whether their children will be able to play it after they die? Not so much. That eventuality may, in fact, be specified in the license, but the nature of this particular ownership relationship includes a degree of rational ignorance on the users’ part: The typical consumer simply doesn’t care. In other words, she is, in Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon’s term, “boundedly rational.” That isn’t deception; it’s a feature of life without which we would be overwhelmed by “information overload” and unable to operate. We have every incentive and ability to know the terms we care most about, and to ignore the ones about which we care little.

Relatedly, P&H also fail to understand the relationship between price and ownership. A digital song that is purchased from Amazon for $.99 comes with a set of potentially valuable attributes. For example:

  • It may be purchased on its own, without the other contents of an album;
  • It never degrades in quality, and it’s extremely difficult to misplace;
  • It may be purchased from one’s living room and be instantaneously available;
  • It can be easily copied or transferred onto multiple devices; and
  • It can be stored in Amazon’s cloud without taking up any of the consumer’s physical memory resources.

In many ways that matter to consumers, digital copies are superior to analog or physical ones. And yet, compared to physical media, on a per-song basis (assuming one could even purchase a physical copy of a single song without purchasing an entire album), $.99 may represent a considerable discount. Moreover, in 1982 when CDs were first released, they cost an average of $15. In 2017 dollars, that would be $38. Yet today most digital album downloads can be found for $10 or less.

Of course, songs purchased on CD or vinyl offer other benefits that a digital copy can’t provide. But the main thing — the ability to listen to the music — is approximately equal, and yet the digital copy offers greater convenience at (often) lower price. It is impossible to conclude that a consumer is duped by such a purchase, even if it doesn’t come with the ability to resell the song.

In fact, given the price-to-value ratio, it is perhaps reasonable to think that consumers know full well (or at least suspect) that there might be some corresponding limitations on use — the inability to resell, for example — that would explain the discount. For some people, those limitations might matter, and those people, presumably, figure out whether such limitations are present before buying a digital album or song For everyone else, however, the ability to buy a digital song for $.99 — including all of the benefits of digital ownership, but minus the ability to resell — is a good deal, just as it is worth it to a home buyer to purchase a house, regardless of whether it is subject to various easements.

Consumers are, in fact, familiar with “buying” property with all sorts of restrictions

The inability to resell digital goods looms inordinately large for P&H: According to them, by virtue of the fact that digital copies may not be resold, “ownership” is no longer an appropriate characterization of the relationship between the consumer and her digital copy. P&H believe that digital copies of works are sufficiently similar to analog versions, that traditional doctrines of exhaustion (which would permit a lawful owner of a copy of a work to dispose of that copy as he or she deems appropriate) should apply equally to digital copies, and thus that the inability to alienate the copy as the consumer wants means that there is no ownership interest per se.

But, as discussed above, even ownership of a physical copy doesn’t convey to the purchaser the right to make or allow any use of that copy. So why should we treat the ability to alienate a copy as the determining factor in whether it is appropriate to refer to the acquisition as a purchase? P&H arrive at this conclusion only through the illogical assertion that

Consumers operate in the marketplace based on their prior experience. We suggest that consumers’ “default” behavior is based on the experiences of buying physical media, and the assumptions from that context have carried over into the digital domain.

P&H want us to believe that consumers can’t distinguish between the physical and virtual worlds, and that their ability to use media doesn’t differentiate between these realms. But consumers do understand (to the extent that they care) that they are buying a different product, with different attributes. Does anyone try to play a vinyl record on his or her phone? There are perceived advantages and disadvantages to different kinds of media purchases. The ability to resell is only one of these — and for many (most?) consumers not likely the most important.

And, furthermore, the notion that consumers better understood their rights — and the limitations on ownership — in the physical world and that they carried these well-informed expectations into the digital realm is fantasy. Are we to believe that the consumers of yore understood that when they bought a physical record they could sell it, but not rent it out? That if they played that record in a public place they would need to pay performance royalties to the songwriter and publisher? Not likely.

Simply put, there is a wide variety of goods and services that we clearly buy, but that have all kinds of attributes that do not fit P&H’s crabbed definition of ownership. For example:

  • We buy tickets to events and membership in clubs (which, depending upon club rules, may not be alienated, and which always lapse for non-payment).
  • We buy houses notwithstanding the fact that in most cases all we own is the right to inhabit the premises for as long as we pay the bank (which actually retains more of the incidents of “ownership”).
  • In fact, we buy real property encumbered by a series of restrictive covenants: Depending upon where we live, we may not be able to build above a certain height, we may not paint the house certain colors, we may not be able to leave certain objects in the driveway, and we may not be able to resell without approval of a board.

We may or may not know (or care) about all of the restrictions on our use of such property. But surely we may accurately say that we bought the property and that we “own” it, nonetheless.

The reality is that we are comfortable with the notion of buying any number of limited property interests — including the purchasing of a license — regardless of the contours of the purchase agreement. The fact that some ownership interests may properly be understood as licenses rather than as some form of exclusive and permanent dominion doesn’t suggest that a consumer is not involved in a transaction properly characterized as a sale, or that a consumer is somehow deceived when the transaction is characterized as a sale — and P&H are surely aware of this.

Conclusion: The real issue for P&H is “digital first sale,” not deception

At root, P&H are not truly concerned about consumer deception; they are concerned about what they view as unreasonable constraints on the “rights” of consumers imposed by copyright law in the digital realm. Resale looms so large in their analysis not because consumers care about it (or are deceived about it), but because the real object of their enmity is the lack of a “digital first sale doctrine” that exactly mirrors the law regarding physical goods.

But Congress has already determined that there are sufficient distinctions between ownership of digital copies and ownership of analog ones to justify treating them differently, notwithstanding ownership of the particular copy. And for good reason: Trade in “used” digital copies is not a secondary market. Such copies are identical to those traded in the primary market and would compete directly with “pristine” digital copies. It makes perfect sense to treat ownership differently in these cases — and still to say that both digital and analog copies are “bought” and “owned.”

P&H’s deep-seated opposition to current law colors and infects their analysis — and, arguably, their failure to be upfront about it is the real deception. When one starts an analysis with an already-identified conclusion, the path from hypothesis to result is unlikely to withstand scrutiny, and that is certainly the case here.

In Amazon, Apple, Copyright, Intellectual Property, Law & Economics, Platforms , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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How to Regulate: An Overview

Thom Lambert —  30 January 2017

So I’ve just finished writing a book (hence my long hiatus from Truth on the Market).  Now that the draft is out of my hands and with the publisher (Cambridge University Press), I figured it’s a good time to rejoin my colleagues here at TOTM.  To get back into the swing of things, I’m planning to produce a series of posts describing my new book, which may be of interest to a number of TOTM readers.  I’ll get things started today with a brief overview of the project.

The book is titled How to Regulate: A Guide for Policy Makers.  A topic of that enormity could obviously fill many volumes.  I sought to address the matter in a single, non-technical book because I think law schools often do a poor job teaching their students, many of whom are future regulators, the substance of sound regulation.  Law schools regularly teach administrative law, the procedures that must be followed to ensure that rules have the force of law.  Rarely, however, do law schools teach students how to craft the substance of a policy to address a new perceived problem (e.g., What tools are available? What are the pros and cons of each?).

Economists study that matter, of course.  But economists are often naïve about the difficulty of transforming their textbook models into concrete rules that can be easily administered by business planners and adjudicators.  Many economists also pay little attention to the high information requirements of the policies they propose (i.e., the Hayekian knowledge problem) and the susceptibility of those policies to political manipulation by well-organized interest groups (i.e., public choice concerns).

How to Regulate endeavors to provide both economic training to lawyers and law students and a sense of the “limits of law” to the economists and other policy wonks who tend to be involved in crafting regulations.  Below the fold, I’ll give a brief overview of the book.  In later posts, I’ll describe some of the book’s specific chapters. Continue Reading…

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Error Costs, Law & Economics, Platforms, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Truth on the Market , , , , , ,
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Time to Get Rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Alden Abbott —  9 February 2016

In my Heritage Foundation Legal Memorandum published yesterday, I call for elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), on constitutional and economic policy grounds.  As I explain:

The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, is living up to its billing as one of the most powerful—and unaccountable—federal agencies ever created.  After just 18 months—and with a staff exceeding 1,000 and funding of $600 million—the bureau is restructuring the mortgage market; devising restrictions on credit bureaus, education loans, overdraft policies, payday lenders, credit card plans and prepaid cards; and amassing unverified complaints with which to assail creditors and bankers. This inordinate control over consumer finance is constraining credit and harming the economy. . . .

The bureau was designed to evade the checks and balances that apply to most other regulatory agencies. Its very structure invites expansive rulemaking, as does its misappropriation of the emergent theory of behavioral economics that drives bureau decision making. It deems consumers prone to financial irrationality and thus ill-equipped to act in their self-interest. Consequently, the CFPB is compelled to intervene in consumers’ personal financial transactions.

Government interference in the financial market does not come without consequences. In the case of the CFPB, the rule of law is being supplanted by regulatory whim, producing deep uncertainty in the consumer financial market. And, the new regulatory strictures will increase consumers’ costs and reduce consumers’ choices of financial products and services.

Lawmakers must curtail the bureau’s unconstrained powers. Outright elimination of the CFPB is the best option. Consumer protection can be advanced instead through better coordination among [other existing and more accountable] financial regulator[y] [agencies]. Proceeding toward bureau dissolution, bureau funding should be controlled by Congress, and the vague language of the CFPB’s statutory mandate must be tightened to stop bureaucrats from defining—and expanding—their own powers.

In sum, elimination of the CFPB, accompanied by reallocation of its essential functions to other agencies and the paring back of excessive financial services regulation, would promote a sounder economy and greater constitutional accountability.

In Credit Cards, Financial Regulation, Truth on the Market ,
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Commissioner Wright lays down the gauntlet on Section 5

Geoffrey Manne —  16 April 2013

joshua-wright As Thom noted (here and here), Josh’s speech at the ABA Spring Meeting was fantastic.  In laying out his agenda at the FTC, Josh highlighted two areas on which he intends to focus: Section 5 and public restraints on trade.  These are important, even essential, areas, and Josh’s leadership here will be most welcome.

I’m especially encouraged by his comments on Section 5.  As readers of this blog know, Section 5 has been an issue near and dear to our hearts, and Josh’s intention to make it a centerpiece of his agenda at the Commission should come as no surprise. (There are too many posts on topic to link them individually here, but this link includes all our posts tagged with Section 5.  My own most recent discussion of the general topic (with Berin Szoka) is here).

Of perhaps greatest significance is this bit from Josh’s speech:

The Commission, however, has another choice available. It can and should issue a policy statement clearly setting forth its views on what constitutes an unfair method of competition as we have done with respect to our consumer protection mission…. I firmly believe this Commission is up to this important task and I look forward to working with my fellow Commissioners. In that spirit, I will soon informally and publicly distribute a proposed Section 5 Unfair Methods Policy Statement more fully articulating my views and perhaps even providing a useful starting point for a fruitful discussion among the enforcement agencies, the antitrust bar, consumer groups, and the business community.

This is great news, and I eagerly look forward to Josh’s proposed Policy Statement.  As Berin and I noted (and as others, including most notably Bill Kovacic, have noted, as well), this kind of guidance is sorely lacking and much needed:

Rather than attempting to do this in the course of a single litigation, the agency ought to heed Kovacic and Winerman’s advice and do more to “inform judicial thinking” such as by “issu[ing] guidelines or policy statements that spell out its own view about the appropriate analytical framework.”

Not surprisingly, my views line up with Josh’s, and his speech is full of important comments on the current state of Section 5 enforcement at the Commission. Of note:

(1) Objective evaluation of the historical record reveals a remarkable and unfortunate gap between the theoretical promise of Section 5 as articulated by Congress and its application in practice by the Commission;

(2) There is little hope for Section 5 to play a productive role in antitrust enforcement unless the Commission articulates in a policy statement about precisely what constitutes an unfair method, how the agency will decide whether to bring unfair method claims, and a general framework including guiding and limiting principles for evaluating Section 5 cases.

* * *

What does a frank assessment of the 100 year record of Section 5 tell us about its contribution to the competition mission? Or as I might put it, has Section 5 lived up to its promise of nudging the FTC toward evidence-based antitrust? I believe the answer to that question is a resounding “no.” There is no shortage of scholars and commentators filling the empty vessel of Section 5 with visions or further promise or purpose of, for example, creating convergence among international jurisdictions, shifting the attention of competition policy from economic welfare to consumer choice, or incorporating behavioral economics into modern antitrust. History, however, tells us that Section 5 has fallen far short of its intended promise. Section 5 has not produced more than a handful of adjudicated decisions with any durable impact on antitrust doctrine or economic welfare.

* * *

After one hundred years the balance of evidence more than suggests the Commission’s use of Section 5 has done little to influence antitrust doctrine and less to inform judicial thinking or to provide guidance to the business community. This void is not a small matter for an administrative agency whose institutional blueprint contemplated such a significant role for Section 5. In my view, it is the Commission’s duty to provide that guidance. But beyond our obligation as responsible stewards of the FTC and consumers through execution of our competition mission, there is considerable risk to the agency of continuing on its current path of putting Section 5 to use without providing guidance. I simply do not believe that path is sustainable or sound competition policy. Section 5 will not live up to its promise of offering an analytically coherent contribution to competition policy if the Commission continues not to offer guidance.

Focusing in particular on the problem of the currently unfettered Section 5 and how it might sensibly be circumscribed, Josh makes some great points:

First, Section 5 should not be used to evade existing antitrust law. Where courts have proven competent to evaluate a particular type of business conduct under the traditional antitrust laws, there is little reason for the Commission to step in under its unfair methods authority. This is especially the case when Section 5 is used to take advantage of a weakened requirement to prove consumer harm in the rigorous manner required in, for example, Section 2 cases. Evading the consumer welfare proof requirements of existing Sherman Act jurisprudence reduces the credibility of the agency, runs the risk that procompetitive conduct will be condemned under Section 5, and circumvents the healthy development of Sherman Act jurisprudence in the courts.

* * *

A second potential limiting principle is a restriction that Section 5 unfair methods cases – as is the case with invitation to collude cases – do not involve plausible efficiency claims. Not only does the lack of efficiency justification reduce any potential collateral consequences associated with false positives, but determining the presence of absence of cognizable efficiencies also plays to a core institutional strength of the Commission. The Commission’s learning and expertise in this regard has already influenced the evolution of the Merger Guidelines, and is applied on a regular basis.

I have no doubt Josh can and will deliver on his promise of working with the other Commissioners to bring some much needed sense to this problematic aspect of the FTC’s authority. This is an enormously important issue, one in great need of attention, and I can think of no one better than Josh to lead the effort to address it.

In Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, Merger Guidelines, Regulation, Section 5 , , , , , , ,
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Ginsburg & Wright on Behavioral Law and Economics: Its Origins, Fatal Flaws, and Implications for Liberty

Josh Wright —  19 September 2012

My paper with Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg (D.C. Circuit; NYU Law), Behavioral Law & Economics: Its Origins, Fatal Flaws, and Implications for Liberty, is posted to SSRN and now published in the Northwestern Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

Behavioral economics combines economics and psychology to produce a body of evidence that individual choice behavior departs from that predicted by neoclassical economics in a number of decision-making situations. Emerging close on the heels of behavioral economics over the past thirty years has been the “behavioral law and economics” movement and its philosophical foundation — so-called “libertarian paternalism.” Even the least paternalistic version of behavioral law and economics makes two central claims about government regulation of seemingly irrational behavior: (1) the behavioral regulatory approach, by manipulating the way in which choices are framed for consumers, will increase welfare as measured by each individual’s own preferences and (2) a central planner can and will implement the behavioral law and economics policy program in a manner that respects liberty and does not limit the choices available to individuals. This Article draws attention to the second and less scrutinized of the behaviorists’ claims, viz., that behavioral law and economics poses no significant threat to liberty and individual autonomy. The behaviorists’ libertarian claims fail on their own terms. So long as behavioral law and economics continues to ignore the value to economic welfare and individual liberty of leaving individuals the freedom to choose and hence to err in making important decisions, “libertarian paternalism” will not only fail to fulfill its promise of increasing welfare while doing no harm to liberty, it will pose a significant risk of reducing both.

Download here.

 

In Law & Economics , , ,
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Cass Sunstein Returns to Harvard

Josh Wright —  3 August 2012

From the WSJ:

White House regulatory chief Cass Sunstein is leaving his post this month to return to Harvard Law School, officials said Friday.

Mr. Sunstein has long been an advocate of behavorial economics in setting policy, the notion that people will respond to incentives, and has argued for restraint in government regulations. As such, he was met with skepticism and opposition by some liberals when he was chosen at the start of the Obama administration.

As administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget, his formal title, Mr. Sunstein led an effort to look back at existing regulations with an eye toward killing those that are no longer needed or cost effective. The White House estimates that effort has already produced $10 billion in savings over five years, with more to come.

“Cass has shown that it is possible to support economic growth without sacrificing health, safety and the environment,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. He said these reforms and “his tenacious promotion of cost-benefit analysis,” will “benefit Americans for years to come.”

Even so, conservatives point to sweeping new regulations for the financial sector and health care in arguing that the administration has increased the regulatory burden on businesses.

Mr. Sunstein will depart this month for Harvard, where he will rejoin the law school faculty as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy.

It will be interesting to hear, once Professor Sunstein returns to an academic setting, his views on whether and in what instances — aside from the CFPB — behavioral economics actually had much impact on the formation of regulatory policy within the Administration.

In Regulation ,
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Some Skepticism About the Role of Behavioral Economics in the FTC’s Antitrust Analysis

Josh Wright —  6 July 2012

Given the enthusiasm for application of behavioral economics to antitrust analysis from some corners of the Commission and the academy, I found this remark from Alison Oldale at the Federal Trade Commission interesting (Antitrust Source):

Behavioral economists are clearly correct in saying that people and firms are not the perfect decision makers using perfect information that they are portrayed to be in many economic models. But alternative models that incorporate better assumptions about behavior and which give us useful ways to understand the likely effects of mergers, or particular types of conduct, aren’t there yet. And in the meantime our existing models give us workable approximations. So we haven’t done much yet, but we’ll keep watching developments.

For myself, I wonder whether the first place behavioral economic analysis might be brought to bear on antitrust enforcement will be in areas like coordinated effects or exchange of information. These are areas where our existing theories are not very helpful. For example when looking at coordinated effects in merger control the standard approach focuses a lot on incentives to coordinate. But there are lots and lots of markets where firms have an incentive to coordinate but they don’t seem to be doing so. So it seems there is a big piece of the puzzle that we are missing, and perhaps behavioral economics will be able to tell us something about what to look at in order to get a better handle when coordination is likely in practice.

I certainly agree with the conclusion that the behavioral economics models are not yet ready for primetime.  See, for example, my work with Judd Stone in Misbehavioral Economics: The Case Against Behavioral Antitrust or my series of posts on “Nudging Antitrust” (here and here).

In Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission
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