Designing a Choice Architecture for Regulators

The emergence of behavioral public administration has led to increasing calls for public managers and policy makers to consider predictable cognitive biases when regulating individual behaviors or market transactions. Recognizing that cognitive biases can also affect the regulators themselves, this article attempts to understand how the institutional environment in which regulators operate interacts with their cognitive biases. In other words, to what extent does the “choice architecture” that regulators face reinforce or counteract predictable cognitive biases? Just as knowledge of behavioral insights can help regulators design a choice architecture that frames individual decisions to encourage welfare-enhancing choices, it may help governments understand and design institutions to counter cognitive biases in regulators that contribute to deviations from public interest policies. From these observations, the article offers some modest suggestions for improving the regulatory choice architecture.     

The Effect of Negotiation Practices on the Relationship between Suppliers and Customers

This article examines the effects of negotiation practices, such as coercion and contract formality, on how suppliers and customers perceived the resulting business relationship. We conducted a purchasing negotiation simulation with students in a classroom setting in which participants competed for resources in a mock supply-chain context. The participants were surveyed at key stages of the ongoing negotiation in order to measure their behaviors as a customer–supplier relationship developed. The data were used to test several hypotheses developed from the marketing and purchasing literature. The hypotheses were analyzed using structural equation modeling.
Results demonstrated that the use of coercive techniques by negotiators during negotiation had a negative effect on satisfaction. In addition, the findings showed that, as expected, negotiators entering a negotiation with a cooperative orientation would tend to avoid the use of coercive practices during negotiation. The cooperative orientation also exhibited an unexpected positive effect on the formalization of the design of the contract between the parties. This study contributes to the current knowledge base focusing on the creation of agreements between companies and will, we hope, encourage the integration of suppliers and customers in an operating context within a supply-chain setting.     

Environmental dispute resolution and hazardous waste cleanups: A cautionary tale of policy implementation

New York State experimented with replacing their litigation-oriented system for achieving toxic dump site cleanup with one promising to lower transaction costs through alternative dispute resolution. Our analysis of outcomes is informed by three generations of implementation work focusing on (1) the motivations and incentives shaping individual behavior, (2) the larger organizational and political factors associated with variation across cases, and (3) the generic properties of policy implements. This mosaic approach to explanation produces, we believe, a more lifelike picture of use to policy makers for understanding the dynamic and interrelated nature of their choices.     

Trial and Error – Failing and Learning in Criminal Proceedings

This paper addresses the selective mechanisms by which criminal proceedings produce strong arguments. It does so by focusing on the failing of argument themes (topoi) in the course of criminal proceedings, rather than on their career. In a further step, the notion of failing is bound to learning: different forms of failing point at different ways and places of learning. The study is comparative, relating cases from four different legal regimes (England, USA, Italy and Germany) that are taken from four extensive ethnographic studies in defense lawyer’s firms. We will track down the failures of topoi at three different stages (pre-trial, trial, and deliberation) in our different legal regimes. Failing occurs in all proceedings in various modes and at different stages. We argue that those modes as well as the different stages at which they occur point at the spots in the respective procedures that allow for learning about the inherent conceptions of “good reasons.”     

Literatur

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

GRANDPARENT VISITATION RIGHTS

In recent years, legislators in all fifty states have given grandparents rights to petition for visitation privileges with grandchildren that can be enforced over parental objections. Grandparent visitation rights reflect an effort to protect meaningful relationships children enjoy with nonparental caregivers, enlist the assistance of extended family when the child's nuclear family is disrupted, and defend the interests of grandparents themselves. This psycholegal analysis explores the direct and indirect consequences of grandparent visitation statutes for family functioning. Statutory provisions are summarized, and the effects of these statutes are evaluated in light of what is known about the role of grandparents in child development, how courts evaluate children's "best interests" in grandparent visitation disputes, and how these statutes can alter family functioning in informal ways. The authors conclude that there are risks as well as benefits to children and families in grandparent visitation statutes, and suggest directions for procedural and statutory reform.