Regulators’ Experimentation Toolkit • 2: Regulatory experiments
Part B: Is regulatory experimentation right for you? Regulatory experiments can be helpful to regulators in need of data and information to support decision-making in situations where this might be difficult to obtain using other approaches. Like any approach, regulatory experimentation has its own strengths and weaknesses, and it will not be applicable to every challenge a regulator faces. This section provides a checklist of considerations to help you determine whether regulatory experimentation is the right approach for your situation. Use it to determine if a regulatory experiment would help you to gather evidence to support a decision you are facing
1. Are you asking the right type of question? Use this section to complete the Research questions section of the Is regulatory experimentation right for you? worksheet. When thinking about what you want to find out, you need to ensure that the question you are asking can be answered using an experiment. There are many different types of questions that you might be interested in investigating. For example, you might be interested in strategic questions such as “What areas of regulatory policy should we focus our attention on?” You might be interested in descriptive questions such as “What are the key regulatory challenges that innovators are facing?” Equally, you might have process-related questions such as “Are our compliance mechanisms effective and appropriate?” These questions are all crucial for successful program design and evaluation, but not all of them require a regulatory experiment in order to reach an answer.
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