Regulation in Happyville

François Salanié and Nicolas Treich

Economic Journal, 2009, vol. 119, issue 537, 665-679

Abstract: How does risk perception affect risk regulation? Happyville is a society in which citizens wrongly believe that the drinking water supply is contaminated. We discuss conditions under which a benevolent Director of Environment Protection would invest in a water cleanup technology. This holds if the Director is populist, namely if he maximises social welfare based on citizens’ pessimistic beliefs. More surprisingly, investment in the water cleanup technology may occur if the Director is paternalistic, in the sense that he maximises social welfare based on his own beliefs. The reason is that he must take into account citizens’ responses to regulation.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2009.02221.x

Related works:
Journal Article: Regulation in Happyville (2009)
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:wly:econjl:v:119:y:2009:i:537:p:665-679

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1111/(ISSN)1468-0297

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Journal is currently edited by Estelle Cantillon, Martin Cripps, Andrea Galeotti, Morten Ravn, Kjell G. Salvanes, Frederic Vermeulen, Hans-Joachim Voth and Rachel Kranton

More articles in Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().