During the past twenty-five years the amount of research on the economics of government regulation has increased enormously. The study of public-policy approaches to problems in industrial organization was once limited almost exclusively to antitrust policy and the regulation of a few industries with natural monopoly characteristics. This area of inquiry has been transformed as new administrative agencies with powers to set prices, restrict entry, and control what products are produced, and how, have come to affect the efficiency of industrial markets and the distribution of production and income throughout the economy. The increased attention to the economics of administrative regulation is due to a number of factors. First, research has benefited considerably since the late 1950s from the application of modern statistical analysis and the mathematics of constrained optimization. Although technically unsophisticated by contemporary standards, the classic works by Averch and Johnson (1962), Caves (1962), Meyer et al. (1959), and Stigler and
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