Seeing clearly with regulatory stances: What would the world look like under different regulatory stances?

Regulation involves shaping markets to address market failure. The simplest way to understand the purpose of regulation is to state how policy aims to alter a market’s size—either shrinking, expanding, or maintaining it—by applying competitive advantages or disadvantages to a sector relative to its competitors. Dr. Liber will illustrate how to use this framework, called regulatory stances, to analyse past regulatory policy changes and to envisage potential future regulatory landscapes. He argues that by establishing a clear vision of the desired market outcome, we can work backwards to identify the policy choices necessary to achieve that vision. By teaching the audience how to recognise their preferred regulatory stance towards a market, they will be better equipped to identify points of policy agreement and disagreement with colleagues. The audience will be encouraged to clarify their goals, with the aim of bringing clarity to disagreements and potentially discovering new pathways forward.