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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Yes, there are also related examples of this in some of Ariely's books. If you introduce a fine for showing up late at daycare the number of late people and the average lateness goes up, not down, because then people are "buying" the right to be late for example.

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There were some issues with the paper you're citing ("A fine is a price"). I believe a grad student wanted to replicate their analyses and they told him the data had been lost, which is pretty weird. I wonder if anyone has replicated the experiment.

> they told him the data had been lost, which is pretty weird

I don't think that is weird at all. After the lead student on a project leaves, the faculty, especially non-technical or not so organized ones, may not even know how to access the data anymore. Who knows what arcane scripts or processes are needed to get it in a shareable form.

There can also be hoops with the IRB to jump through and a lot of effort in general to give someone access to data. I had an IRB insist that all raw data be deleted after 2 years of collection anyway, so by the time the paper got published the raw data had to be deleted forever.

I wish it were easier to release data and replication kits, but sadly the incentives aren't there.

For big names in a field not to know to keep their data - certainly today, that would be shocking. I think it was quite shocking even back then. I still have my data for my work from my PhD in the 2000s. It isn't a job you'd leave to a student. IRB hoops are a different matter - but this wasn't that, as I recall.

Or maybe if you do not have a specified fine, then in the heads of people there is still a “virtual fine” associated with being late, but it is not an exact number, but a wide range, and people tend to predict all kinds of bad things that would happen (but 99% of times it wont happen), so the fear of an unknown punishment is higher than a known one.

Intuitively the present value of punishment is amount of punishment x probability of getting it, and if the second term is nil then so is the punishment; but according to many studies I believe the amount of punishment is much less important and being caught is what matters.

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