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

We conduct an artefactual field experiment using a diversified sample of passengers of public transportation to study attitudes toward dishonesty. We find that the diversity of behavior in terms of (dis)honesty in laboratory tasks and in the field correlate. Moreover, individuals who have just been fined in the field behave more honestly in the lab than the other fare dodgers, except when context is introduced. Overall, we show that simple tests of dishonesty in the lab can predict moral firmness in life, although fraudsters who care about social image cheat less when behavior can be verified ex post by the experimenter.

Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2616.

This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.