The efficiency of crackdowns: a lab-in-the-field experiment in public transportations

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• 作者：Zhixin Dai ; Fabio Galeotti ; Marie Claire Villeval
• 关键词：Crackdowns ; Fraud ; Risk ; Monitoring ; Transportation ; Field experiment
• 刊名：Theory and Decision
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：82
• 期：2
• 页码：249-271
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Business and Economics
• 刊物主题：Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods; Game Theory, Economics, Social and Behav. Sciences; Operation Research/Decision Theory; Behavioral/Experimental Economics; Statistics for B
• 出版者：Springer US
• ISSN：1573-7187
• 卷排序：82

文摘

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crackdowns reduce fare-dodging during the period of intense monitoring but induce a burst of fraud as soon as they are withdrawn; (c) pre-announced controls induce more fraud in the periods without control. Overall, we also observe that real fare-dodgers fraud more in the experiment than non-fare-dodgers.