Environmental Regulation Informed by Biased Stakeholders

Stefan Ambec and Jessica Coria

No 24-1604, TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE)

Abstract: Public consultations are widely used in regulatory processes, allowing stakeholders to present their viewpoints despite their inherent biases. Some stakeholders, such as firms, are known to be pro-business, while others, such as environmental NGOs, are pro-environment. Other such as national authorities have unknown bias. We develop a framework to analyze how a regulator processes information provided by biased stakeholders. We show that the regulator follows the advice that runs counter to a stakeholder’s typical bias: to regulate if firms so advise and not to regulate if environmental organizations so advise. Without such advice, she prioritizes the comments from stakeholders with unknown biases. We then contrast our theoretical results with the regulation of chemicals in the European Union. Consistent with the model’s predictions, support for regulation is more strongly associated with regulatory outcomes when it comes from firms than from NGOs or environmental organizations. We also find that regulatory decisions are more strongly correlated with comments from national authorities than from other stakeholders, both in terms of participation and relative support.

Keywords: Environmental policy; incomplete information; cheap talk; biased expertise; private politics; chemicals, REACH (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-12-20, Revised 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-gth and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/docu ... 2024/wp_tse_1604.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Environmental Regulation Informed by Biased Stakeholders (2026)
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:tse:wpaper:130037

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().