[wutbrodo]

No it doesn't. Self-regulation is often motivated by 1) collective action problems where coordination benefits every company in a way that individual action wouldn't or 2) to ward off govt regulation by showing the govt that you can behave, as an industry.

Neither of these require anything but self-interest and the profit motive from the involved parties.

[SonnyWortzik]

> collective action problems where coordination benefits every company in a way that individual action wouldn't

Remember we are talking about Capitalist corporations that answer to investors.

Your point is great if there is an incentive to only benefit the consumer. The benefit in this case is to maximize profit at all cost. Profit creed(not greed) is to ingrained the need to maximize profit. Because of that, greed is the ultimate driver against achieving 'self regulation', hence the reason why we have gov regulations in the first place.

[wutbrodo]

> Your point is great if there is an incentive to only benefit the consumer.

The entire point of my comment was explicitly claiming that this isn't required in order for regulation to benefit companies' bottom-line. I'll repeat: there are collective action problems where coordination (between companies) benefits every party (company) in a way that individual (company) action wouldn't, even when the coordination takes the form of constraints on individual behavior. My comment was assuming the model of corporations as solely profit-maximizers, and it still occurs under that assumption.

It's fairly basic game theory. If the defect-defect equilibrium leaves everyone worse off, and defect-cooperate leaves the defector better off than cooperate-cooperate would, then then under certain fairly reasonable assumptions, putting constraints on the behavior of all parties (i.e., regulation) makes the cooperate-cooperate equilibrium stable in a way it otherwise wouldn't be.