Sending a Message: An Empirical Assessment of Responses to Punitive and Non-punitive Compliance Messaging Strategies

Regulators operate in an increasingly hostile political environment. The U.S. Supreme Court is ramping up efforts to curtail the authority of administrative agencies. The second election of Donald Trump to the presidency has unleashed a torrent of anti-regulatory fervor. These are but the latest salvos in a long-running assault on the power of administrative agencies to regulate business. For decades, agencies have faced the challenge of enforcing extensive regulatory requirements with resources that are wildly inadequate to the task. Is it possible to persuade regulated individuals and entities to comply with a rule if they face vanishingly low odds of being the target of enforcement activity? The authors partnered with staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a field experiment testing the relative efficacy of different messaging strategies to motivate compliance with under-enforced rules that require building contractors to certify their adherence to lead paint safety measures. We compared the relative efficacy of punitive messaging against more positive and cooperative messaging strategies. Contrary to influential scholarship touting the compliance benefits of cooperative approaches to regulation, we found that the punitive, deterrence-based message produced the greatest compliance gains overall even though regulators devoted no new resources to enforcement. Our findings yield important insights for regulators trying to do more with less.