Voluntary waiver of a fine
After a late night at work, John Doe gets stuck behind a car that is going way below the speed limit on a one-lane highway. Frustrated and wanting to get home as soon as possible to see his family before they go to sleep, he checks for traffic on the opposing side of the road to see if everything is clear. John then drives quickly to the other side of the road so that he can pass the car in front of him. To his surprise, there were two cars in front of him rather than just one, and the cars that he thought were so far away are approaching closer than he hoped. John makes a quick maneuver and squeezes in between the two cars in just enough time to prevent an accident. He realizes that one of the cars on the opposing side of the road was a police vehicle, and John is pulled over one minute later.
The police officer scolds him for his dangerous maneuver, and asks for John’s license and registration. The police officer goes back to his vehicle and stays there for a good 10 minutes. John in the mean time is terrified. He wonders how much he will be fined and how he is going to find time to go to traffic school. The officer returns to John’s car and tells him he has decided to only issue a warning this time but that he should be more careful.
Taking Fehr and Rockenbach’s study (Nature, 2003) and revising the facts and definitions a bit, the police officer here had three options (note that I am ignoring the possibility that the officer does not pull over John at all):
1. Trust condition – fine not possible. The police officer would pull over John, but could not give them a ticket. John would know that the police officer has no power to issue tickets
2. Incentive condition – fine imposed. The police officer pulls John over and issues him a ticket.
3. Incentive condition – fine not imposed. The police officer pulls John over. Although the officer can issue John a ticket, he decides not to.
Some will say that this fact pattern more accurately fits the “notion of “reciprocal altruism” as defined by Trivers.” (Fehr and Rockenbach, 2003). I disagree, and instead believe that the relationship of John with the police officer is a one-off game with only indirect elements of “reciprocal altruism. The police officer gives up some utility by not issuing the ticket – he is foregoing an opportunity to approach his ticket quota (see http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/…). In addition, John and the officer are unlikely to ever meet again, and probably do not know each other already, so their “social distance” is probably large.
Nonetheless, the fact pattern does have a repeated game element since John will drive again. But the interesting quirk here is that the one who sanctions is the law enforcement system in general. Yet, it is individual police officers, with their own sense of altruism and empathy, who decide whether to issue the tickets themselves.
I’d be very interested in a retrospective study of whether individuals who are issued warnings are more or less likely than individuals who were issued actual fines to either cooperate or defect in the future. The study could trace any number of variables including the size of the fine (high sanction, low sanction) and the size of the city (social distance in some towns will probably be small since people will know each other), among others. A benefit of this study would be the potentially large sample size.
My guess? Forcing John to pay a fine and attend traffic school will be most effective in convincing him to follow the law.
erinarcherd
February 11, 2008 @ 6:44 pm
Very interesting. You and I have quite different views of how likely this is to be perceived as a repeated game. I think it is quite likely that in this scenario, someone would think themselves a future target for the same cop (or another in the same place), but maybe that’s because my dad was pulled over twice on the way home from work by the same officer!
vhettinger
February 12, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
The difficulty with your example is that John is unlikely to think he did anything specifically wrong (assuming he wasn’t in a no-passing zone). He miscalculated, and once he realized his miscalculation he hurriedly tried to rectify it. I point this out because John was already highly intrinsically motivated to not make that mistake again. An extrinsic motivator of a fine and traffic school probably wouldn’t work to crowd out that particular intrinsic motivation (being smushed on the highway is a universal bad.) Similarly, the extrinsic motivator of the policeman’s kind act, while I believe it would generally reinforce John’s intrinsic motivation, is also completely redundant. If John can help it, he won’t get himself into that situation again. The problem is that it’s an error in judgment that is relatively unpredictable, as opposed to a conscious violation like speeding.
Still, if your example was offered to problematize the conclusions of the Fehr & Rockenbach study, I quite agree with you. The researchers seem to have stacked the deck for their result by limiting the ‘fine’ that could be imposed to only 4 units, which is certainly far less than the investor was requesting from the trustee. This calls to mind the Gneezy/Rustichini finding (A Fine is a Price*) highlighted in the Benkler article. Making the consequence of anti-social behavior fungible with financial capital relieves the actor from the psychic responsibility of holding himself accountable for his actions. If the fine is lower than the cost of compliance, he will generally fail to comply (and probably sleep just fine believing that in paying the fine he has ‘bought’ the right to behave that way).
* This is the study that found that parents are actually more likely to pick their children up late from school when a ‘tardiness fine’ is imposed.