SEMINAR: Designing Biosecurity Inspection Protocols Accounting for Stakeholder Incentives: Theoretical and Experimental Insights

Government regulators face significant trade-offs in conducting their roles. In Australia, Commonwealth, state and territory governments have been challenging their regulatory agencies to decrease the regulatory burden they impose on compliant stakeholders. However, poorly designed approaches to allocating a regulator’s interventions may inadvertently encourage stakeholder behaviours that go counter to the policy objectives for regulating particular activities in the first place. This presentation draws on evidence from game-theoretic models and economics experiments to investigate the potential behavioural responses of plant-product importers to alternative regulatory regimes in the Australian biosecurity inspection context. The focus is on rules from the continuous sampling plan family of rules that have been implemented recently by the Australian Government Department of Agriculture and Water Resources for border interventions on select plant-based products. The first part of the presentation considers theoretical predictions arising from a dynamic inspection game between the biosecurity regulator and a vertically integrated importer. The second part of the presentation discusses results from economic experiments where subjects played the role of importers who had choice over their suppliers.