 Explaining uniformity in rule design: The role of citizen participation in enforcementTimo Goeschl and Ole Jürgens International Review of Law and Economics, 2012, vol. 32, issue 1, 166-177 Abstract: Uniform rules incur high aggregate compliance costs when agents are sufficiently heterogeneous. Despite this, uniformity remains a common feature in regulation. Focusing on the monitoring stage of enforcement, this paper highlights an underappreciated benefit of uniform rules. Uniformity of regulation can enhance the productivity of monitoring. We illustrate the general mechanism by showing that in the presence of members of the public that are willing and able to report violations to the regulator at a cost to themselves, uniform rules allow substituting third-party participation for costly own monitoring. However, socially desirable acts may have to be punished to generate deterrence for undesirable acts. Individualizing monitoring and enforcement and citizens acting on welfare considerations do not improve on the outcome. Keywords: Law enforcement; Third-party participation; Standard setting (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:irlaec:v:32:y:2012:i:1:p:166-177 DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2011.12.002 Access Statistics for this article International Review of Law and Economics is currently edited by C. Ott, A. W. Katz and H-B. Schäfer More articles in International Review of Law and Economics from Elsevier |
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