Cass R. Sunstein

Bio: Cass R. Sunstein is an academic researcher from Harvard University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Supreme court & Constitution. The author has an hindex of 117, co-authored 787 publications receiving 57639 citations. Previous affiliations of Cass R. Sunstein include Brigham Young University & Indiana University.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: Myths and Realities

Abstract: Since its creation in 1980, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a part of the Office of Management and Budget, has become a well-established institution within the Executive Office of the President. This Commentary, based on public documents and the author's experience as OIRA Administrator from 2009 to 2012, attempts to correct some pervasive misunderstandings and to describe OIRA's actual role. Perhaps above all, OIRA operates as an information aggregator. One of OIRA's chief functions is to collect widely dispersed information--information that is held by those within the Executive Office of the President, relevant agencies and departments, state and local governments, and the public as a whole. Costs and benefits are important, and OIRA does focus closely on them (as do others within the executive branch, particularly the National Economic Council and the Council of Economic Advisers), especially for economically significant rules. But for most rules, the analysis of costs and benefits is not the dominant issue in the OIRA process. Much of OIRA's day-to-day work is devoted to helping agencies work through interagency concerns, promoting the receipt of public comments on a wide range of issues and options (for proposed rules), ensuring discussion and consideration of relevant alternatives, promoting consideration of public comments (for final rules), and helping to ensure resolution of questions of law, including questions of administrative procedure, by engaging relevant lawyers in the executive branch. OIRA seeks to operate as a guardian of a well-functioning administrative process, and much of what it does is closely connected to that role. I. INTRODUCTION The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has become a well-established, often praised, and occasionally controversial institution within the federal government. (1) OIRA was initially created by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, (2) with (among other things) the particular responsibility of approving (or disapproving) information collection requests from federal agencies. In one of his early actions, taken less than a month after assuming office, President Ronald Reagan gave OMB an additional responsibility, which is to review and approve (or decline to approve) federal rules from executive agencies, with careful consideration of costs and benefits. (3) Within OMB, that responsibility is exercised by OIRA. The Administrator of OIRA is often described as the nation's "regulatory czar." While it is an understatement to say that this term is an overstatement (and that is one of my major claims here), it does give a sense of the range and responsibility of the office. From September 2009 until August 2012, I was privileged to serve as OIRA Administrator. (4) I had taught and written about administrative law for over two decades, and much of my work focused explicitly on OIRA. (5) Nonetheless, there was a great deal that I did not know, and much of what I thought I knew turned out to be wrong or at best incomplete. Even among close observers--in the media, in the business and public interest communities, and among academics, including professors of law--the role of OIRA and the nature of the OIRA process remain poorly understood. It is frequently and mistakenly thought, for example, that OIRA review almost exclusively involves the views and perspectives of OIRA itself; (6) that when rules are delayed, it is almost always because of OIRA's own concerns; (7) that when rules are long delayed or ultimately not issued, it is generally because OIRA opposes them; that analysis of costs and benefits is the dominant feature of OIRA review; (8) and that OIRA review is highly political. (9) Much of the discussion of OIRA focuses on OIRA's role as part of White House oversight of agency rulemaking. (10) To be sure, that role is quite important, and it will receive considerable attention here. …

Heuristics and Public Policy: Decision-making Under Bounded Rationality:

Abstract: How do human beings make decisions when, as the evidence indicates, the assumptions of the Bayesian rationality approach in economics do not hold? Do human beings optimize, or can they? Sev...

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Abstract: Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

The behaviour change wheel: a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions.

Abstract: Improving the design and implementation of evidence-based practice depends on successful behaviour change interventions. This requires an appropriate method for characterising interventions and linking them to an analysis of the targeted behaviour. There exists a plethora of frameworks of behaviour change interventions, but it is not clear how well they serve this purpose. This paper evaluates these frameworks, and develops and evaluates a new framework aimed at overcoming their limitations. A systematic search of electronic databases and consultation with behaviour change experts were used to identify frameworks of behaviour change interventions. These were evaluated according to three criteria: comprehensiveness, coherence, and a clear link to an overarching model of behaviour. A new framework was developed to meet these criteria. The reliability with which it could be applied was examined in two domains of behaviour change: tobacco control and obesity. Nineteen frameworks were identified covering nine intervention functions and seven policy categories that could enable those interventions. None of the frameworks reviewed covered the full range of intervention functions or policies, and only a minority met the criteria of coherence or linkage to a model of behaviour. At the centre of a proposed new framework is a 'behaviour system' involving three essential conditions: capability, opportunity, and motivation (what we term the 'COM-B system'). This forms the hub of a 'behaviour change wheel' (BCW) around which are positioned the nine intervention functions aimed at addressing deficits in one or more of these conditions; around this are placed seven categories of policy that could enable those interventions to occur. The BCW was used reliably to characterise interventions within the English Department of Health's 2010 tobacco control strategy and the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence's guidance on reducing obesity. Interventions and policies to change behaviour can be usefully characterised by means of a BCW comprising: a 'behaviour system' at the hub, encircled by intervention functions and then by policy categories. Research is needed to establish how far the BCW can lead to more efficient design of effective interventions.

International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Abstract: Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

Risk as Feelings

Abstract: Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfield of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.

A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality.

Abstract: Early studies of intuitive judgment and decision making conducted with the late Amos Tversky are reviewed in the context of two related concepts: an analysis of accessibility, the ease with which thoughts come to mind; a distinction between effortless intuition and deliberate reasoning. Intuitive thoughts, like percepts, are highly accessible. Determinants and consequences of accessibility help explain the central results of prospect theory, framing effects, the heuristic process of attribute substitution, and the characteristic biases that result from the substitution of nonextensional for extensional attributes. Variations in the accessibility of rules explain the occasional corrections of intuitive judgments. The study of biases is compatible with a view of intuitive thinking and decision making as generally skilled and successful.