Master of Public Policy- Legal and Regulatory Interventions in Stanford United States | Stanford University

The allocation of scarce resources is generally left to decentralized market forces and autonomous citizens. But markets sometimes have serious imperfections, and humans exhibit various cognitive biases. Intervention by the state seeks to avoid or mitigate the adverse outcomes of such imperfections. Intervention can take various forms, including taxes or subsidies, agency regulation, and legal rules that seek to improve the compatibility of individual incentives with social welfare (or with citizens ex post evaluations of their own decisions). However, interventions in practice may fail to improve outcomes, either through inadequate design or other challenges. This concentration focuses on an understanding of the analytical and empirical relationships between imperfect market or cognitive processes and imperfect state interventions. The concentration consists of courses from economics, law, management science and engineering, psychology and other programs dealing with industrial organization, antitrust, utility regulation, consumer protection, social psychology, contracts, administrative law and specific regulatory regimes.