the complexity and ambiguity inherent in many important legal changes and the important role that
affected actors play in turning vague laws into concrete policies and practices. The theory does this by
allowing legal policy to be a complex task wrought with noisy signals and complicated goals and
constraints. This setup means that identifying the best policy response, which may comprise anything
combination of elements ranging from the precise words of a written policy to more concrete actions
such as hiring a new administrator to head a new department, is difficult and costly. That is, it assumes
that while there may be a theoretically best response for a given institution given the specifics of the
law, the costs of getting in trouble, the organization’s resources, its other priorities and activities, its
normative views, and other factors, this ideal response will at times be hard to identify and implement.
Additionally, central to the theory is the reality that legal changes usually affect a number of actors at
the same time which affords the opportunity to learn from, and/or follow, others who are confronting
the same challenge at roughly the same time. The theory is essentially a model to understand behavior
when solving a complex problem, in this case legal response policy making, given the opportunity to
learn from and/or follow others.
Specifically, the model assumes four possible decision tactics for an organization confronting a
complex and/or ambiguous legal change in which it does not know its ideal response. It can a)
implement its best guess based on what it does know –potentially a noisy signal about its best policy
response b) invest in costly research and analysis to learn more and tailor a custom, and likely more
effective, policy from scratch c) invest (though less than the cost of tailoring in option b) to observe
another’s policy (or the policy ideas a third party such as an industry association proffers) and then use
it as the basis for a new, but modified (altered), and better fitting, policy, or it can d) simply
implement another’s policy “off the shelf” with minimal modifications. It also assumes that the
organizations confronting a legal change vary in important ways including in their capacity and
7
Convention