Cass Sunstein
The Reformer
Changing the system from inside it, principle turned into change.
Cass Sunstein embodies The Reformer through his insistence that regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have misdiagnosed the algorithmic economy's harms. His response is characteristically surgical. Rather than reaching for blunt prohibition, he presses for transparency mandates and corrections to behavioral bias, naming the precise mechanism institutions have failed to address. In doing so he reshapes consumer protection doctrine from within, the reformer's method of changing a system by out-arguing it.
“A first line of defense is to try to ensure consumer protection, not through heavy handed regulation... but through helping people to know what they're buying and helping people not to suffer from a behavioral bias.”
“We need to know what the algorithms are doing. So it's public what's Amazon's algorithm doing? That would be good to know — this is a coming thing, right to algorithmic transparency.”
“Neither Europe nor the US has put their regulatory finger on the actual problem — algorithms exploiting a lack of information or a behavioral bias to get people to buy things at prices that aren't good for them.”
Masters in Business: “At The Money: Fan Favorite - Algorithmic Harm”
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