Whether regulating mutual funds or chemical manufacturers, government's policy decisions depend on information possessed by industry. But it is not in any industry's interests to share information that will lead to costly regulations. So how do government regulators secure needed information from industry? Since information disclosed by any firm cannot be retrieved and can be used to regulate the entire sector, industry faces a collective action problem in maintaining silence. While collective silence is easy to maintain if all firms' interests are aligned, their payoffs for disclosure can vary due to heterogeneous effects of regulation and heterogeneous beliefs about the regulator's expected actions with or without any given information. The regulator's strategy is therefore to resist or break down industry's collective silence, either by (1) exploiting asymmetries in firms' interests in disclosure, or (2) selectively rewarding or punishing individual firms to create incentives for disclosure. Both of these strategies work best when pursued informally, in less visible ways, since other firms can be expected to inflict retribution on any squealer. Although informal relationships have been long deplored due to the risk of regulatory bias or capture, our analysis shows how they can be beneficial to government in playing the information game. This has important implications for regulatory procedure. Since total transparency would detract from government's ability to secure valuable information, administrative law needs to balance between the competing needs of transparency to prevent abuse and opacity to facilitate information exchange. Securing Truth for Power: Informational Strategy and Regulatory Policy Making "The … power that is involved here is the power to get information from those who best can give it and who are most interested in not doing so."

We present cost sharing methods for connected facility location games that are crossmonotonic and competitive and that recover a constant fraction of the cost of the constructed solution. The novelty of this paper is that we use randomized algorithms and that we share the expected cost among the participating users. As a consequence, our cost sharing methods are simple and achieve attractive approximation ratios. We also provide a primal-dual cost sharing method for the connected facility location game with opening costs.

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Under which conditions is it advantageous for countries to form a single payments area? This question is analyzed in a model of spatial bank competition to understand better the economic foundations of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). An economic research perspective on the mostly informal policy debates about SEPA is developed. The analysis suggests that expectations about the positive effects of SEPA may be exaggerated as most channels for enhancing public welfare seem rather weak. Still the project may be worthwhile undertaking if the cost of creating SEPA-compliant systems is reduced by extending the time frame for the implementation phase and if the use of electronic payments is promoted.

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