IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jleorg/v12y1996i1p196-213.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Fire-Alarm Signals and the Political Oversight of Regulatory Agencies

Author

Listed:
  • Hopenhayn, Hugo
  • Lohmann, Susanne

Abstract

In political settings, delegation is often motivated by differences in expertise of costs of information gathering. Even if a political principal is less well informed than a regulatory agency, she can monitor whether the agency is acting in her best interests by taking informational cues from the media, interest groups, and constituents. In response to such "fire-alarm" signals, the principal may engage in political oversight activities. This article examines how asymmetric external information flows give rise to asymmetric political control rules that introduce bias and inconsistency into regulatory outcomes. Copyright 1996 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Hopenhayn, Hugo & Lohmann, Susanne, 1996. "Fire-Alarm Signals and the Political Oversight of Regulatory Agencies," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 12(1), pages 196-213, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:12:y:1996:i:1:p:196-213
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Heyes, Anthony & Kapur, Sandeep, 2009. "Enforcement missions: Targets vs budgets," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 58(2), pages 129-140, September.
    2. Fabio Padovano & Ilaria Petrarca, 2013. "When and how politicians take ‘scandalous’ decisions?," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 24(4), pages 336-351, December.
    3. Hansson Lisa, 2012. "The Private Whistleblower: Defining a New Role in the Public Procurement System," Business and Politics, De Gruyter, vol. 14(2), pages 1-28, August.
    4. Santiago Urbiztondo & Fernando Navajas & Daniel Artana, 1998. "La autonomía de los entes reguladores argentinos: Agua y cloacas, gas natural, energía eléctrica y telecomunicaciones," Research Department Publications 3038, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    5. Rodney Fort, 2022. "College sports governance: “Amateurism” enforcement in big time college sports," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 23(3), pages 303-322, December.
    6. repec:vuw:vuwscr:19075 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Heyes, Anthony & Kapur, Sandeep, 2009. "Enforcement missions: Targets vs budgets," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 58(2), pages 129-140, September.
    8. Shi, Lan, 2009. "The limit of oversight in policing: Evidence from the 2001 Cincinnati riot," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(1-2), pages 99-113, February.
    9. Alevy, Jonathan E., 2001. "A Principal-Agent Approach To The Delegation Of Regulatory Authority," 2001 Annual meeting, August 5-8, Chicago, IL 20764, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    10. Roger D. Congleton, 2019. "Fiscal Bargaining and the Implicit Fiscal Constitutions of Liberal Democracies: A Public Choice Perspective," Public Policy Review, Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Finance Japan, vol. 15(2), pages 175-198, December.
    11. Patrick A. McLaughlin & Adam C. Smith & Russell S. Sobel, 2019. "Bootleggers, Baptists, and the risks of rent seeking," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 30(2), pages 211-234, June.
    12. Lohmann, Susanne & Hopenhayn, Hugo, 1998. "Delegation and the Regulation of Risk," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 222-246, May.
    13. Swank Otto H., 2000. "Seeking information: the role of information providers in the policy decision process," Public Economics 0004004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Özgün AKDURAN-EROL, 2024. "Regulation of Natural Monopoly: The Turkish Electricity Market," Sosyoekonomi Journal, Sosyoekonomi Society, issue 32(60).
    15. Peter Grajzl, 2011. "A property rights approach to legislative delegation," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 12(2), pages 177-200, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:12:y:1996:i:1:p:196-213. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jleo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.