Ariely's Honest Truth took a close look at our human frailty when it comes to ethics and commitments. Based on Ariely's book, on the one hand one might argue that we need clear structure and constraints to protect ourselves and our society from our own imperfections, and yet, on the other hand it may be argued that those charged with regulating and controlling the rest of us are just as imperfect, and thus that we should be skeptical of centralized regulatory powers.

Obviously, we need government regulations on a variety of different aspects of business, but how do we best ensure that the regulators are really acting in the public interest? After all, the regulators have their own incentives, and historically we have observed multiple instances of "regulatory capture" where industry insiders and lobbyists for different stakeholders have shaped industrial regulations to fit whatever they wanted to protect themselves from, including pressures from competition, etc.

This is a complex issue and reasonable people may come up with very different answers to this question. That said, your assignment to write a short essay (minimum 400 words) on the extent to which you believe that Ariely's arguments are relevant for government regulation of business.