Most businesses today have to abide by some form of regulations that are designed to govern how they can practice and behave.  Most of these aim to ensure the business operates safely, ethically, fairly and so on, but of course, not all businesses abide by these regulations.

Whereas most research into why regulations are breached focuses on organizational factors, a new study from Vanderbilt University looks at the matter from the perspective of the rules themselves.  Was there something about the rules themselves that made businesses more likely to break them?

The researchers tested the hypothesis that complex rules would understandably be harder to follow, and therefore more likely to be broken.  Complexity was defined as the number of components the rule had, and/or the number of connections it had to other rules.  Those rules that met both criteria were especially vulnerable, but also harder for regulators to fix any violations.

Rules and regulations

The researchers assessed over 1,000 restaurant inspections conducted in California, which featured over 80,000 individual instances of either compliance or noncompliance with regulations over a three year period.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the more complicated the rules, the more frequently they were violated, whilst the greater the connections to other rules exacerbated the problem.

In terms of remediation, the fact that rules were broken was no indication that the problem would be fixed.  Indeed, once a rule was violated once, it was highly likely to be violated a second time.  Things weren’t completely straightforward however, as when the regulation was complex, a solution was much more likely to be found than when it was connected to other rules.

The authors believe their findings could help regulators reinforce the rules more effectively, especially if they’re able to take a more holistic look at how businesses are engaging with the rules already in place.

“The takeaway here is that the way rules are designed matters, too, and they should be a subject of study in their own right,” they conclude.