Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure
strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and
services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these
targeted transparency policies include financial securities
disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile
rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute
a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens.
However, as Full Disclosure shows these policies are frequently
ineffective or counterproductive. Based on a comparative analysis
of eighteen major policies, the authors suggest that transparency
policies often produce information that is incomplete,
incomprehensible, or irrelevant to the consumers, investors,
workers, and community residents who could benefit from them.
Sometimes transparency fails because those who are threatened by it
form political coalitions to limit or distort information. To be
successful, transparency policies must place the needs of ordinary
citizens at centre stage and produce information that informs their
everyday choices.

? Offers powerful analysis of policy effectiveness to
non-professional readers, such as corporate financial reports,
Megan's laws, nutritional labels, and school report cards ?
Discusses how information and communication technology by Google,
Wikipedia, Amazon, etc. - foreshadow a new generation of
collaborative transparency policies ? Breaks new ground by
addressing disclosure policies as a coherent type of government
action, alongside legally required standards and market-based
regulatory

1. Governance by transparency; 2. An unlikely policy
innovation; 3. Designing information-based regulation; 4. What
makes disclosure work; 5. What makes disclosure policies
sustainable?; 6. International transparency; 7. Toward
collaborative transparency; 8. The future of disclosure; Appendix:
Eighteen major cases.