TY  - BOOK
AU  - Peltzman,Sam
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Toward a More General Theory of Regulation
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 1976///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - April 1976; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - In previous literature, George Stigler asserts a law of diminishing returns to group size in politics: Beyond some point it becomes counterproductive to dilute the per capita transfer. Since the total transfer is endogenous, there is a corollary that dirninishing returns apply to the transfer as well, due both to the opposition provoked by the transfer and to the demand this opposition exerts on resources to quiet it. Stigler does not himself formalize this model, and my first task will be to do just this. My simplified formal version of his model produces a result to which Stigler gave only passing recognition, namely that the costs of using the political process limit not only the size of the dominant group but also their gains. This is at one level, a detail, which is the way Stigler treated it, but a detail with some important implications -- for entry into regulation, and for the price-output structure that emerges from regulation. The main task of the paper is to derive these implications from a generalization of Stigler's model
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w0133
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w0133
ER  -