Study On Principal-agent Problem And Legal Countermeasures In Our Country Food Safety Supervision Field

The topic of this paper: Food safety supervision right is one of the functions of thegovernment as the social administrators which should be responsible for. From theperspective of information economics, China’s food safety supervision departments of all thelevels are just the agent of food safety supervision rights for all the public. And there existsthe principal-agent relationship between the social public which are the principals and them.In the information economics literature, it is often referred as the “agent”, the participantswho have the information in the game, participants those who do not have the information arereferred as “principal”. In the food safety supervision relationship, agent is for thegovernment, the principal is for the public. It belongs to the Moral hazard with hidden actionmodel, the principal can only observe a result, but he cannot observe the action of agent itselfand the state of nature itself directly. In this model, the social public d the supervision rightbased on the trust in the food safety regulators, but the delivery is just a kind of legal fiction,there exists the virtual agent phenomenon in the reality. In theory, the principal and agent alsotend to the differences in the objective function. The agent (government regulators) may beinadequate and goodness to perform the duty of the agent because of self-interest and beabusing the regulatory power, and distort the food safety regulatory effect, because ofnon-market in the agency relationship, it will damage the interests of the principal due to theimproper exercise of the food safety supervision. At the same time, the food safetysupervision system exists the multiple agents and the agent long chain situation, among thevarious departments of all levels, the agent goal and behavior orientation may vary from oneagent to another one. The lack of uniformity leads to that the principal’s goal can not beachieved. And the lack of communication and cooperation between regions and departmentsthere exists of information insurmountable gap, and information resources could not bemutual exchanged.In this paper, the study thinking: this article follows the specification-empiricalcomparison-countermeasure research train of thought, firstly it introduces the principal-agenttheory and through the analysis of principal-agent relation in food safety supervision;secondly to seek the theoretical basis of food safety supervision system; Second, the analysisof the current legal system of food safety regulation, just to discovery system problems and analyze the reason; thirdly the introduction of foreign advanced food safety regulatoryexperience; finally, the consummation of system suggestions are put forward.The main viewpoints in this paper, which is different from the perspective of publicmanagement to search the food safety regulatory system, it points out that the governmentas a food safety regulators is the agent for the social public food safety supervision rights, inthe process of regulation may be exist agent problems, such as the principal phantom,extension chain agent, asymmetric information, non-market agency relationship, etc, on thebasis of the regulation system of western developed countries for reference, according to theprincipal-agent problem in food safety regulatory it attempts to put forward a new idea offood safety supervision system.