THE direct economic regulation of business by independent government commissions has a one-hundred year history on the North American continent. The first state commissions having mandatory powers were established in Illinois and Minnesota in 1871,1 while the first federal regulatory commission in the United States, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), was organized in 1887.2 In Canada, the earliest regulatory commission was the Board of Railway Commissioners, organized in 1903.3 It is generally asserted that the purpose of such commissions is to protect consumers from exploitation by limiting the economic powers of certain firms having pervasive effects on the public interest (for example, transportation companies and public utilities). Given this common purpose, one would expect some consistency in the actual economic effects of regulation by federal and state commissions. However, the findings of the relatively few empirical studies of the economic effects of regulation indicate that important differences actually do exist in these effects. For example, Stigler and Friedland concluded that the regulation of electric utilities by state commissions from 1907 through 1937 had no measurable impact on the level of electric utility rates, on the charging of discriminatory prices, and on the market