Examining previously underused corporate documents, we revisit the story of the Asbestos Information Association/North America, an industry trade group that sought in the early 1970s to counteract the growing public attention to, and government regulation of, asbestos as a serious threat to workers and consumers. From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, according to its own spokesperson, asb...

Firms in emerging economies exhibit dangerously low compliance with government regulations aimed at protecting society from the negative externalities of their operations. Weak government enforcement contributes to this lack of compliance, but we argue that the limited legitimacy of government and its regulations also plays a critical role, especially among firms without insider access to key p...

Our understanding of how markets and businesses operate was passed down to us more than a century ago by English economist Alfred Marshall. It is based on the assumption of diminishing returns: products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into limitations so that a predictable equilibrium of prices and market shares is reached. The theory was valid for the bulk-processing, sm...

Tort law is a form of collective intervention into social and economic affairs that carries with it substantial costs, both public and private. These costs include higher prices for goods and services, higher taxes, and the socially undesirable consequences that tort law has on people's behavior such as the failure of companies to develop and introduce products the public wants, the wasteful an...

In order to improve government transparency and promote interagency coordination, interagency networks have been investigated by social science researchers using data collected using traditional manual mechanisms such as interview and survey. In this paper, we show that World Wide Web (WWW) and Linked Open Data (LOD) can be used to automatically generate interagency networks and thus promote in...

OBJECTIVE To study the effect of various types of inoculation message treatments on resistance to persuasive and potentially deceptive health- and nutrition-related (HNR) content claims of commercial food advertisers. METHODS A three-phase experiment was conducted among 145 students from a Midwestern U.S. university. Quantitative statistical analyses were used to interpret the results. RESU...

Administrative agencies frequently use guidance documents to set policy broadly and prospectively in areas ranging from Department of Education Title IX enforcement to Food and Drug Administration regulation of direct-to- consumer pharmaceutical advertising. In form, these guidances often closely resemble the policies agencies issue in ordinary notice-and-comment rulemaking. However, guidances ...

This feature explores the operation of individual markets. Patterns of behavior in markets for specifi c goods and services offer lessons about the determinants and effects of supply and demand, market structure, strategic behavior, and government regulation. Suggestions for future columns and comments on past ones should be sent to James R. Hines Jr., Professor of Economics, University of Mich...