The growth of the sharing economy has challenged not only traditional regulatory approaches but also traditional notions about how regulations are made and enforced. While typically thought of as top-down phenomena — deliberately designed and planned — a regulation, in its broadest sense, is any rule of behavior that establishes order.

In a new working paper published by the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, Matthew Mitchell and Christopher Koopman use the overlapping regulatory approaches in the vehicle-for-hire industry to create a taxonomy for better understanding regulation that accounts for both public and private enforcement as well as those regulations that are both planned and emergent.

The paper has been accepted as a chapter in the forthcoming book, The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of the Sharing Economy, published by Cambridge University Press.