In this paper, Daniel Pryor argues that competition interventions in digital markets have often been premised on faulty economic assumptions and therefore led to various unintended consequences
In this new piece in our Past Learnings Series, George Yarrow discusses the publicly perceived “untrustworthiness” of politicians
Scaling geologic time to (say) one year, homo sapiens has existed for less than an hour. In that twinkling of an eye, we have developed some capacity for foresight – an enormous evolutionary leap in one of nature’s creatures.
The 6th piece in our series Past Learnings, this piece is an extensive re-working of a paper first published in September 2016, which was likewise a thought experiment on a potential regulatory approach to the control of migration flows
The RPI’s latest piece in our Past Learnings Series discusses the complexity of economic systems and the common inability of policy-makers to fully account for that complexity when making policy changes.
“Change” was the slogan of the British Labour Party in the recent General Election. It certainly didn’t do serious damage to electoral prospects; but it
This is a write-up of the session “Statistics in Regulation and Policy“, given at the RPI Annual Competition and Regulation Conference 2024. This may seem
Our 4th paper in our Past Learnings series, this short paper discusses the division of labour within the organisational and institutional structures that we call
This piece in the Past Learnings Series is based on a hitherto unpublished internal Regulatory Policy Institute Paper dating from 2012.
Entrepreneurship is something of a ‘ghost in the machine’ so far as most economic theorising is concerned. It’s widely mentioned and tends to be encouraged by politicians, but detailed analysis of the concept is largely missing from standard economics. So, we ask: what is its nature, why is it important, and what (very briefly) might be done to encourage it?
A quick web-search for the meaning of the word elegant yields the following (from Oxford languages): Adjective : (1) graceful and stylish in appearance or
The notion that promoting competition is a Good Thing has become a consistent theme in economic policymaking in recent decades, accompanied by an implication that “the more of it the better” should be a presumptive policy stance. In contrast, very many members of the public appear to find these propositions far from obvious, not least those who are owners of, or workers for, business enterprises.
The notion of ‘fairness’ is widely referenced in public policymaking and enforcement, but with no settled meaning. What we see is incoherent application of the notion across economic contexts, a form of policy disorder with which we are well familiar. Moreover, the disorder (‘entropy’) appears to be increasing over time.
Alongside the Prisoners Dilemma, study of the Ultimatum Game (UG) and its variants is a rich source of experimental observations on human attitudes and conduct
Slogans can provide politicians with useful ways of signalling policy objectives. The “tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime” slogan used by
‘Airport Enterprises: An Economic Analysis’ frames the airport firm as a business platform for a broad spectrum of commercial activities, some of which enjoy the characteristics of two-sided markets