| A Fine is a Price (1998) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| The deterrence hypothesis predicts that the introduction of a penalty for a specific behavior, which leaves everything else unchanged, will reduce the occurrence of that behavior. We present here the result of a field study of this hypothesis, conducted in a group of day-care centers in Israel. In these day-care centers, parents sometimes arrive late to collect their children, forcing a teacher to stay after the official closing time. We study the behavior of the parents over three periods. In the first four weeks period we simply record the number of late-coming parents. In the second period, twelve weeks long, we introduce a monetary fine for late-coming parents. As a result the number of late-coming parents increased significantly. In the last period of four weeks we observed the effect of cancellation of the fine. Here the result was that the number of late-coming parents remained stable at the level prevailing in the second period, hence higher than it was in the first period, be... | |||||||||||||||
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