Adrienne Heritier (European University Institute)

“Managing Regulation – A Firm’s Perspective”

Abstract

When dealing with problems of market access, firms are frequently faced with a perplexing number of sectoral and cross-sectoral regulators at the national, European and international level. They have to interact with these regulators in order to obtain decisions necessary for their operations. Given multiple regulators at the national, European and international level of sectoral and cross-sectoral nature, the following questions emerge: Why do firms address a particular/given regulator to deal with specific regulatory problems? Which are there most frequent interaction partners? Do firms address one or several regulators at the same time or even engage in regulatory venue shopping? We offer answers to why firms interact with specific regulator(s) drawing on the principal-agent approach and the theory of regulatory venue shopping. More specifically, we scrutinize whether the motives of political principals for delegating tasks to agents and their mode of controlling agents is reflected in the motives of  firms to address a specific regulator. Do they address a regulator for the same reasons for which this task was originally delegated to the regulator by political principals, such as lack of expertise, lack of capacity and the desire to create policy credibility? Furthermore, the mode in which a political principal controls an agent by collecting additional information from other regulators may also be reflected in firms’ dealing with multiple regulators when seeking a regulatory decision. Specifically, firms may engage in regulatory venue shopping, play regulators against each other and decide to address the regulator(s) from which they expect the most favourable outcome, as well as they may try to collect as much information as possible on their competitors by addressing multiple regulatory agencies.After developing our theoretical argument we propose a number of hypotheses. We proceed to test our hypotheses on the basis of data collected in an online survey with all medium-sized and large network firms in five sectors (energy, telecommunications, railways including rail infrastructure and scheduling firms, airlines, and postal services) in all member states of the EU as well as Switzerland and Norway. We conclude by reconsidering our general explanation in the light of the empirical findings.