Social Context, Framing, and Compliance with the Law: Experimental Evidence

Abstract

We investigate the effects of law enforcement framing and social context on compliance with the law in a lab-in-field experiment. In particular, we examine the effects of framing a simple lottery choice as a law enforcement problem, the effects of noncompliance imposing an external cost on independent third-parties, and the effects of compliance providing a public good to other group members. We varied the probability of monitoring for each of these contexts from low probabilities that would not induce a risk-neutral individual to comply to higher probabilities that would motivate such an individual to comply. Increased monitoring had a positive effect on compliance regardless of the context. Law enforcement framing did not increase compliance relative to the simple lottery when compliance provided a public good to group members, but the law framing had a negative effect on compliance when obeying the law did not benefit group members. Compliance was not affected when violating the law imposed an external cost on third-parties. However, compliance with the law was higher when it provided a public good.

Keywords: economics experiments, field experiments, social dilemma, compliance, regulation, enforcement