| A major task of economics and policy economics is to explain the pattern of government behavior in its interventions in the economy. This paper introduces the use of the Decision Tree methodology to help capture policy making behavior and provide extended insights into the decision making process. Decision Tree is a flexible, non-parametric, data-driven procedure which has been in use since the early 1970's, both as a classification and as a prediction tool; its use in economics has so far been rare, and in modeling regulatory agency behavior in decision-making has been virtually non-existent. Use of this approach not only reveals the significant conditions driving a phenomenon, but also provides a ranking of the conditions - information not readily... |
