The Efficiency of Crackdowns: A Lab-in-The-Field Experiment in Public Transportations

Abstract

The concentration of high frequency controls in a limited period of time ("crackdowns") constitutes an important feature of many law-enforcement policies around the world. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive investigation on the relative efficiency and effectiveness of various crackdown policies using a lab-in-the-field experiment with real passengers of a public transport service. We introduce a novel game, the daily public transportation game, where subjects have to decide, over many periods, whether to buy or not a ticket knowing that there might be a control. Our results show that (a) concentrated crackdowns are less effective and efficient than random controls; (b) prolonged crackdowns reduce fare-dodging during the period of intense monitoring but induces a burst of fraud as soon as they are withdrawn; (c) pre-announced controls induces more fraud in the periods without control. Overall, we also observe that real fare-dodgers fraud more in the experiment than non-faredodgers.

Cheating in the Lab Predicts Fraud in the Field: An Experiment in Public Transportation

“…The fourth part consisted of a dynamic public transportation game in which subjects had to decide on whether buying or not a ticket and in which we manipulated the frequency and regularity of audits, and the information about the future occurrence of audits. The results of this fourth part are reported in Dai et al (2016). 15 Subjects have to report whether they are fully prepared to take risks or whether they prefer to avoid risks on a scale between 0 ("not at all willing to take risks") and 10 ("very willing to take risks"), using the Dohmen et al (2011) procedure.…”

“…30 To make the two measures of lab dishonesty comparable, we construct a standardized measure of dishonesty which is based on the payoffs consequences of subjects' decisions. 31 We first compute the 23 ! expected payoff from fully honest behavior (!…”

“…In Appendix 9, we report additional analysis on the correlation between behavior in the public transportation game and in the die task 31. This analysis builds upon some of the original techniques used in a recent meta study byAbeler et al (2016).…”

Human resource management as a tool to control corruption: Evidence from Mexican municipal governments

“…A randomized policy experiment implemented in Brazil concluded that temporarily increasing annual monitoring risk by about 20 percent reduces the proportion of tampered procurement processes by 15 percent (Zamboni & Litschig 2018). A meta‐analysis of 19 independent experiments showed a negative effect of monitoring on individuals' unethical behavior (Belle & Cantarelli 2017; Dai et al 2017).…”

The Deterrent Effect of the Death Penalty? Evidence from British Commutations During World War I

“…Residual deterrence involves enforcement officials temporarily reducing their enforcement having 'made their point'. The related work is primarily qualitative, observational, or experimental with laboratory games (Sherman 1990;Nagin 1998;Dai et al 2016;Banerjee et al 2014). There are some formal dynamic models in the enforcement 136 Legitimacy is said to drive expressive powers of law, tax compliance, and non-compliance to laws (McAdams 2000; Acemoglu and Jackson 2014; Bénabou and Tirole 2011; Kaplow and Shavell 2006;Hurd 1999;Chen et al 2014;.…”