Decision rules and regulatory reform

The regulation of risks to health and the environment in the United States is currently undergoing serious criticism for its impact on the recession economy. Attempts to diminish health risks by placing stringent limitations on potentially harmful substances are thought to be excessively expensive and ineffective. To remedy this problem, basic reforms in the way these regulations are fashioned have been proposed. Perhaps the best known is cost-benefit analysis. Nevertheless, there are a number of areas where agencies purposely avoid making tradeoffs between costs and benefits and instead assign priorities among levels and types of benefits. However, despite a considerable literature examining the merits of making tradeoffs in regulatory decisions, little attention has been given to the disparate premises of the tradeoff and no-tradeoff rules and how the choice of decision rules determines the role of cost considerations in agency decision making. This paper not only examines these issues, but develops an analytical framework for restructuring the choice between rules. Instead of abolishing the no-tradeoff rules, the analytical framework proposed here can be used to generate a compromise rule which permits partial tradeoffs under certain well-defined circumstances.