ABSTRACT
The idea is to achieve greater efficiency either by constraining actions, or providing private parties with financial disincentives, to keep them from overproducing various outputs. The perspective that many policies derive ultimately from special interest demands should perhaps make people more cautious about recommending that the government take any action at all. All the negotiations over support for bills, the logrolling, the committee infighting, the monitoring challenges of the committee oversight process, the rent-seeking of interest groups doing their worst to try to obtain favorable policies, the negotiation costs that take place with interest groups , and so forth. The institutional approach of this textbook is also an attempt to expand the focus of economics beyond its traditional domain. It has also expanded the set of action arenas in which economic behavior can be fruitfully studied, such as within interest groups and, more generally, in the political sector.
