Originally Posted by flyingcrooked

We have no idea what costs and inconveniences passengers may have had to incur because of this cancellation (no doubt it will vary greatly from person to person, for some it will be trivial, for others it will be huge).

I don't understand what grounds you have for saying there is no indication that fewer flights are being cancelled. The relevant contrast class is the counterfactual situation in which the regulations don't exist, but everything else is the same, and it's not easy to see how to know what is happening in that counterfactual situation. (And if it's APPR we're talking about, we'd also need to compare a situation in which the regulations exist and are actually carefully followed by airlines rather than constantly being ignored, with a situation in which they just don't exist at all. That's not the current situation - now we have the law but weak enforcement/oversight.)

On the face of it though, the suggestion that penalties for cancellations have no impact at all on cancellations seems implausible. One either has to think an airline really just can't do better, or that it is not motivated by penalties.

There have been studies on the effect of airline regulation on performance, but it's hard to know what to make of them since (i) there are so many variables the quality of the studies is questionable, and (ii) there is so much money at stake that the integrity of the studies is questionable.