Cost-Benefit Analysis and Public Sector Trust

Edward H. Stiglitz and Cornell Library

No umvp8, LawRxiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Eighty percent of Americans believe that government is run for “a few big interests” rather than the public interest. Rooted in notions of social welfare, cost-benefit analysis might be seen as an analytical procedure to flush out and discourage at least the most egregious abuses in lawmaking authority, thereby encouraging citizens to view their government as essentially pursuing some plausible notion of the public interest. Yet the extent to which cost-benefit analysis might fill this trust-building role is an unaddressed issue. Here, I conduct an experiment based on a (de)regulatory action in the environmental context to examine whether cost-benefit analysis might yield trust dividends. I find that cost-benefit analysis produces large increases in public sector trust, but only when paired with reasonableness review, and only among “elites.” This pattern of findings suggests that, without more, an agency declaration of cost justification is not credible, but that it may be made so through a form of reasonableness review. I discuss the contours of such review, and highlight perils if review is overly aggressive.

Date: 2017-12-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5a3d2e45ad359f000de6afcf/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:lawarx:umvp8

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/umvp8

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LawRxiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().