Word.ws English Dictionary

regulatory capture

regulatory capture noun: the situation where a regulatory agency, created by government to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the affected industry or sector.

Noun

regulatory capture (countable and uncountable, plural regulatory captures)

  1. The situation where a regulatory agency, created by government to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the affected industry or sector.
    • This process, known as “'regulatory capture,” turns regulators from watchdogs into lapdogs. You don't have to look far to see regulatory capture in action. Securities and Exchange Commission officials are often accused of ignoring warnings about fraud, stifling investigations, even helping...2014, Charles Seife, “Capture”, in John Brockman, editor, What Should We Be Worried About?, Harper Collins, →ISBN, page 36
    • The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.2022 August 5, Jerusalem Demsas, quoting Marc Andreessen, “The Billionaire’s Dilemma”, in The Atlantic

Forms of regulatory capture

pluralregulatory captures

Origin of regulatory capture

First described in The Theory of Economic Regulation (1971).

Questions about regulatory capture

What does regulatory capture mean?
Regulatory capture means the situation where a regulatory agency, created by government to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the affected industry or sector.
What part of speech is regulatory capture?
Regulatory capture is a noun.
What is the plural of regulatory capture?
The plural of regulatory capture is regulatory captures.

Words near regulatory capture in the dictionary

  1. regulatorily
  2. regulatoriness
  3. regulators
  4. regulatorship
  5. regulatory
  6. regulatory capture
  7. regulatory captures
  8. regulatory entrepreneur
  9. regulatory entrepreneurs
  10. regulatory entrepreneurship
  11. regulatory framework

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: regulatory capture (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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