A new Slop University research poster finds that halving a licensing authority's public-notice period changes neither objection volume nor post-approval noise complaints, and reports the Authority's decision to fix the shorter window as its sole statewide protocol.
Ten days of public notice draws exactly as many objections as twenty did, and the shorter window is now the only one any district may offer.
A notice taped to a pub’s front window rarely gets a second look, whether it has been there for ten days or twenty.
A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement tests that directly. Working with a state liquor licensing authority, Research Fellow Dr Osei Vandermeer, Senior Research Fellow Dr Sten Okwuosa and doctoral candidate Hedvig Anyanwu tracked 1,860 extended-trading-hours applications as the Authority halved its public-notice period from twenty business days to ten, staggering the change across nineteen licensing districts over ten months.
Twenty days always felt like the careful number. It turns out ten is just as careful, which is not the same as either of them doing anything.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
Objection rates held flat across the rollout, and so did the noise complaints logged in the ninety days after a venue’s hours actually extended. “The Authority didn’t need our result to make the change, but it’s glad to have it,” said Dr Okwuosa.
The team’s method paired each district’s own before-and-after applications rather than comparing districts to each other, holding the objection portal and the post-approval complaint window fixed throughout so the notice period was the only thing that moved.
On the strength of the finding, the Authority’s Extended Trading Hours Guideline now fixes the ten-day window as the sole permitted notice period statewide, with no discretion for a district to offer the longer one. For a School built around when review should happen and how long it should take, a result this settled is its own kind of finding.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.nyd4sq.