Salience, incentives, and timely compliance: Evidence from speeding tickets

Arbeitspapier

This paper studies the enforcement of fines. We randomly assign 80,000 speeding tickets to treatments that increase the salience of the payment deadline, late penalties, or both. Stressing the penalties significantly and persistently increases payment rates. Emphasizing only the deadline is not effective. The findings from the RCT are consistent with a survey experiment which documents the treatments' impact on priors about parameters of the compliance problem. Exploiting discontinuous variation in fines, we then document a strong price responsiveness: a 1% increase in the payment obligation induces a 0.23 percentage point decrease in timely compliance. This semi-elasticity suggests that the impact of the salience nudges is equivalent to the effect of a 4-9% reduction in fines.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Discussion Papers of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods ; No. 2020/9

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law ; Tax Evasion and Avoidance ; Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty: General
• Subject: Enforcement ; fines ; timely compliance ; salience ; nudges ; deadlines ; perceptions ; RCT ; RDD

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Dusek, Libor ; Pardo, Nicolas ; Traxler, Christian
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/229995
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET