The economics of cheating has long offered fertile ground for research—and for the Ig Nobel Prizes. This year’s Ig Nobel in Economics went to Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and Dacher Keltner for finding that people from higher social classes are more likely to steal candy from children.
The award recognizes research that can bring a different perspective to scientific debate. Past Ig Nobel honors have included work on splash-resistant urinals and an experiment that buried and later dug up 1,000 pairs of underwear to assess soil health. In economics, studies of dishonesty have examined how people behave when they can cheat without immediate consequences.
In a 2004 article for The New York Times Magazine, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner described Paul Feldman, an economist who delivered bagels to more than 100 offices in the Washington area. Customers paid by putting money into an unattended honesty box. Feldman tracked payment rates and found that customers were more likely to pay in smaller offices, where the boss was well regarded, during recessions and after the September 11 attacks. Bagels delivered to executive floors were more frequently taken without payment.
Another study, by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, used unpaid parking tickets issued to United Nations diplomats in Manhattan to examine corruption. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, diplomats with special license plates could park without facing financial consequences for unpaid tickets. The researchers found that the number of unpaid tickets associated with each consulate was strongly linked to perceptions of corruption in its home country. Consulates from Denmark, Norway and Sweden accumulated no unpaid tickets during the six years studied, while one Kuwaiti diplomat accrued the equivalent of two unpaid tickets per working day over a year.
The researchers also found that rules made a difference. In 2002, New York revoked nearly 200 diplomatic plates with support from the U.S. State Department. After the threat of further measures, parking violations fell by 95% almost overnight.
Academic research has also become a case study in dishonesty. A 2012 paper argued that people were less likely to make false statements when they signed an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form rather than at the end. The paper was later retracted after data investigators Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson and Joe Simmons, who publish as Data Colada, argued that two studies supporting its conclusion contained manipulated data.
Data Colada also reported suspected data falsification in other research associated with Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino. Ariely denied manipulating data and said problems were present when the data were provided by others. Gino said she had been falsely accused of research misconduct and that there was a legitimate explanation for the apparent irregularities.
The cases raise questions about how misconduct and poor research practices can go undetected. Together, the studies on bagel payments, diplomatic parking and academic data point to the influence of both personal incentives and the rules governing behavior.
Sources: Folha Mercado.