In the News

Gensler said the SEC has received over 15,000 comment letters on its proposal, the most ever received for a single proposal... “Throughout its history, the SEC has repeatedly required disclosure of information that, while not financial on its face, is nevertheless relevant to investors’ assessment of a registrant’s future financial prospects,” a letter jointly submitted to the SEC from The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law and the Environmental Defense Fund stated.

The practice of partition pricing and marketing has become a topic of interest for the FTC and the CFPB. For example, the FTC recently streamlined procedures to “tackle cutting-edge issues, like … unfair and deceptive practices in event ticket sales, among others,” according to Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. Additional efforts across states are being made to encourage the FTC to ban the use of drip pricing. For example, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law has petitioned the FTC to ban drip pricing practices. The petition argues that sellers should be required to disclose the “full” price of a product or service up front as a single total price, including all unavoidable fees and charges.

On October 11, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) for a sweeping prohibition of “hidden” and “misleading” fees across all industries. This “Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees” can be traced back to the FTC publishing a petition (86 FR 73207) for rulemaking from the Institute for Policy Integrity on “drip pricing” on December 27, 2021. The petition defined drip pricing as “the practice of advertising only a part of a product’s price upfront and revealing additional charges later as consumers go through the buying process.”

Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, says that the problem is going to take a lot to be solved. "Drip pricing is really not good for anyone. It creates a race to the bottom, where all ticket sellers feel like they have to advertise deceptively low fees or they'll lose out to those who do," he said.

Regulating drip pricing is a reasonable proposal. Studies of ticket sales and airline baggage all show that drip pricing makes it harder for consumers to compare prices efficiently. However, the downside of such a proposal stems from the costs that regulation would impose on firms. As discussed in the drip pricing petition penned by the Institute for Policy Integrity, it is important to conduct a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the reduction in consumer search costs and deadweight loss from inefficient purchases would outweigh these regulatory costs on companies.

CPSC member Richard Trumka Jr. said in January that the agency was considering a ban on gas stoves, calling them a “hidden hazard.” These comments followed reports from groups such as the Institute for Policy Integrity and American Chemistry Society that connected gas stoves to health risks.

Last year, the Supreme Court sided with West Virginia in rejecting a different (Obama-era) EPA plan. “The West Virginia decision left intact EPA’s obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that endanger public health from the power sector,” says Dena Adler, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, in an emailed statement. The 2022 ruling left pathways available to the EPA, she says, and “the agency has carefully walked those lines in this proposal.”

This coming Friday, April 28, is more than just another Friday. It is Workers Memorial Day, the day when people around the world pause, recognize, remember, and honor those workers who have paid the ultimate price—suffering, dying, or becoming disabled as a result of injuries and illnesses related to their jobs.

Recently environmentalists have touted a series of studies that find links between gas stoves and health risks. An April 2022 report from the Institute for Policy Integrity summarizes that “[w]ithin just a few minutes of cooking . . . pollutant concentrations can exceed levels” that both EPA and the World Health Organization “have deemed unsafe and linked to respiratory illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and other serious health conditions.”

The CPSC, already walking back some of Trumka’s initial statements, is likely to settle on a compromise approach. A report from New York University Policy Integrity this spring detailed some of those options, including requiring that stoves be sold with hoods, establishing performance standards for those hoods, or equipping gas stoves with sensors that alert the user of pollution concentrations.

“No one’s going to walk into their kitchen tomorrow morning and find a hole where the gas range used to be,” the NYU report co-author, Jack Lienke, said. “The bottom line is that Congress created the CPSC to ensure that consumer products — including home appliances — are reasonably safe. A growing body of evidence indicates that gas stoves aren’t. If the Commission ignored this reality, it wouldn’t be doing its job.”