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

Zhixin Dai (1) , Fabio Galeotti (1) , Marie Claire Villeval (1)

1 GATE Lyon Saint-Étienne - Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon - Saint-Etienne

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crackdowns reduce fare-dodging during the period of intense monitoring but induces a burst of fraud as soon as they are withdrawn; (c) pre-announced controls induces more fraud in the periods without control.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-fare-dodgers.

Mots clés: Crackdowns; fraud; risk; monitoring; transportation; field experiment

Domaines: Economies et finances

Zhixin Dai, Fabio Galeotti, Marie Claire Villeval. The Efficiency of Crackdowns: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment in Public Transportations. 2016. ⟨halshs-01270808⟩