enforcing a specific behaviour widely is much hard.
it gets easier for the authority when there is a turnstile whose control can be acquired and exploited
BUT that causes "traffic" - the things that happens when error-bars on compliance are added into a queue.
it's much costlier to enforce individual-compliance things on a decentralized system, but much easier to comply with.
what drives or reinforces decentralized compliance?
rule enforcement is as difficult as testing for rule violations.
think of mask-wearing enforcement. checking for whether everyone in a public space is wearing a mask is impossible without surveillance capabilities that remain infrastructurally and politically out of reach for the moment. so how do you make sure folks wear their mask?
naive statistical questions
how many people need to wear their mask to slow down spread sufficiently? how forgiving is that number (what is the deviation of outcome over %-mask-wearers?)
how much effort / cost goes into enforcing some marginal %-mask-wearers? what is the efficiency of effort-to-compliance?
the numbers above are all lossy of detail about how the large system evolves.
say you have
civilians, who have their own lives, and slightly disprefer most of the things enforcers tell them to do
enforcers, that can tell civilians what to do, and catch people not-complying
a centralized Command with an ability to tall enforcers what to do, that can depose noncompliant enforcers and impose penalties on noncompliant civilians
this game is shaped much like a Lotka-Volterra but with differences around coalition-forming.
Players can conspire to noncompliance, and if tyhe conspiracy is big enough one can call it defiance, ie that Command ha failed to successfully implement a new rule.
Command's incentive is to successfully implement a mechanism that causes the system to have a specific property.
with mask-wearing, the goal is to design a system where the ratio of new cases to civilian traffic starts dropping.
some naive strategies
associate really high fines with violation of the rules
the penalty itself becomes a bargaining chip with which your enforcers can play games, making in-the-moment-justifiable exceptions at too high a rate.
leniency to signal cooperation in hopes that the other will reciprocate
leniency because the expense of the penality is prohibitive for the violator
a legitimate reason like an emergency, and/or abuse of the emergency loophole
bribe taking
police and check / punish at random
"random" will prefer very public locations for enforcement, and people will notice that they suffer much less risk of being caught outside the most trafficked places; and continue to flout the rule.
create checkpoints, check / punish at random
incentivize enforcers to punish at high rates - you will get a lot of false-positives and corner-case-positives, like arresting legal front-of-line workers, so that the metric being incentivized looks good
new rules or rule changes become very difficult to propagate down the system, because your enforcer-agents are also experiencing standards intertia - they need to make judgment calls about exceptions and individual cases too often for the internalizing of new rules to be cheap. each new rule needs a new strategy.
airport security theatre, otoh, has created a centralized environment, where enforcement is very easy.
thus they get to enforce and change all sorts of arbitrary rules, that change airport-to-airport, because the enforcement environment is so simple.
otoh the efficiency of the rules (security theatre) - relative to the goal (to reduce security threat) keeps dropping, because there isn't any selection pressure away from inefficient rules. the simplest encoding that can probably approximately address a new threat is what ends up being implemented, eg. "one must remove one's shoes at the security check" or "one cannot carry external batteries onto a flight"