Delegation of Regulation

Abstract

We discuss a government’s incentives to delegate regulation to bureaucrats. The government faces a trade-off in its delegation decision: bureaucrats have knowledge of the firms in the industry that the government does not have, but at the same time, they have other preferences than the government. The preference bias and the private information interact to affect the incentives to delegate regulation. Allowing for constrained delegation, we introduce the concepts of weak and strict delegation. We find that bureaucratic discretion reduces with bureaucratic drift, while the effect of increased uncertainty about the firm’s technology depends on how that uncertainty changes.