New Governance Tune-Up: How Behavioral Insights Can Help Refine the New Governance Regulatory Narrative

Abstract

In recent years, a number of legal scholars have advocated “new governance” approaches to regulation. New governance scholars eschew both traditional command-and-control and complete deregulation models, instead focusing on middle-ground hybrid approaches in which legal actors seek to emulate private-sector success stories. New governance narratives paint a sometimes rosy picture of the potential benefits of this kind of hybrid approach. This Article uses William Simon’s legal scholarship about Toyota as a jumping-off point to examine the framing of new governance narratives. New governance proposals often follow a particular story line, setting out empirical and case-study driven accounts of how to build a better mousetrap based on private-sector successes. This narrative structure is intuitive and is psychologically appealing. However, it may be prone to overstate causal connections, due to a variety of behavioral biases such as confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and representativeness heuristic. Scholars cognizant of these potential issues can better “tune up” the new governance framework.