Regulatory Enforcement Analysis

Regulatory enforcement analysis examines how regulators secure compliance — when they persuade, when they punish, and how they choose between the two. Its central framework is responsive regulation, set out by Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite in their 1992 book, which argues that enforcement should be tit-for-tat and proportionate: start with dialogue and persuasion, but escalate up an enforcement pyramid to warnings, civil penalties, licence suspension and ultimately prohibition for actors who persist in non-compliance. The analysis maps a regulator's strategies onto this pyramid and assesses how well its responses are matched to the motivations of the regulated.