In their surprisingly readable A short guide to regulation the National Audit Office sets out a scale of all the ways in which regulation can work.
At one end of the scale is command and control regulation. This includes mandatory government guidance and legal penalties. At the other end of the scale there is no-intervention at all. This means letting the market decide how things turn out. In between, there are codes of practice, information campaigns, economic controls, and other regulatory measures.
It’s not that any one measure is better than another, it is that some are more appropriate in some situations than others. For example, it would be less than ideal to have an entirely free market nuclear sector given that an extinction event from lax work is a pretty enormous negative externality.
In research it’s not clear how regulation should work as a system.
