激励，信息与食品安全规制
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| Title | Incentives, Information and Food Safety Regulation
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| 作者 | 龚强 张一林 余建宇 |
| Author | Gong Qiang, Zhang Yilin and Yu Jianyu |
| 作者单位 | 西南财经大学经济与管理研究院， |
| Organization | Southwestern University of Finance and Economics |
| 作者Email | qgongpku@gmail.com,yujianyu@swufe.edu.cn |
| 中文关键词 | 食品安全 规制 信息不对称 信息揭示 责任制度 |
| Key Words | Food Safety; Regulation; Information Asymmetry; Information Disclosure; Liability |
| 内容提要 | 本文研究在信息严重不对称的食品市场中如何通过信息揭示提高食品安全规制的效率。在现有的制度环境下，规制者在检测和监管方面受到行政资源的局限并存在被俘获的可能性，企业有机会采用成本更低的不良生产技术。研究表明，强制企业揭示生产和交易中决定食品安全的关键环节的信息是提高食品安全的有效途径。规制者通过界定企业需要揭示哪些生产和交易环节的信息，能够为社会、第三方、相关监管部门提供监督的平台。尽管企业可能提供虚假信息，但由于引入了社会各方面资源的监督，企业的不良行为更加容易被发现，并可能承担严厉的社会惩罚，企业生产劣质食品的动机降低。揭示信息会增加单个企业的成本，但是整个行业的可信度得以提升，消费者支付意愿增加，最终行业利润提升，激励企业向更安全转型。进一步，信息揭示还能减少规制者被俘获的可能性。此外，尽管价格管制能够提高消费者福利，但会导致食品安全整体水平下降，降低社会总福利。 |
| Abstract | This paper investigates the food safety regulation in the presence of the information asymmetry. Due to the limitation of inspection and monitoring of regulation and the possibility of “regulatory capture”, firms have incentive to adopt the production technology, which costs less but may have unsafe impact on consumers’ health. The result shows that efficiency can be achieved by requiring firms to disclose the information of production and transaction that is critical for food safety. In doing so, the regulator establishes an information platform for the supervision of various parties in the society, including the third party, consumers and relevant monitors. Although the individual firm’s cost increases, the firms using unsafe technology will find it more likely to be detected and receive more severe punishment from the society, and hence suffer a larger loss than the firms adopting safe technology. As a result, the credibility of the industry increases, which raises the consumers’ willingness to pay and the profit of the safe firms. This, in turn, gives incentive for firms to switch to safer technology. The analysis on efficiency of price intervention shows that, although a price ceiling can increase consumer surplus, it reduces the overall level of food safety and hence the social welfare. |
| 文章编号 | WP408 |
| 登载时间 | 2013-02-01 |
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