THE VALUE OF PUNISHMENT

This short refection will focus on criminal behaviour, specifically, on small offenses like not paying for public transport. Firstly, based on the expected value theory (cite required), a tourist who wonder sneaking or not in the subway of Berlin would calculate as follows. Based on average estimation, taking 4 tickets per day during 6 days, costing 3€ each ticket, entails 72€. The fine for sneaking is 40€. (“BVG.de - Homepage,” n.d.) Supposing that the average tourist has 50% to be caught, that leads to an expected monetary value of 36€ in case of not being caught and a loss of 20€ in case of being caught. So that, for an average tourist, rationally speaking, sneaking in the subway is a good bet. This reasoning would raise again the problem about the quantity of the fines or their actual utility.

But, instead of focus on the amount of money people would lose or gain, I prefer focus my attention on the frame. Supported on the knowledge about the power of framing effects (Tversky & Kahneman, 1986) and the loss aversion effect (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991), we can notice that people tend to avoid loses depending on how the information is displayed. Even more, we can suppose certain kind of moral behaviour if we reflect on the fact that the subjects are looking for the option which will harm as less people as possible. Consequently, in order to prevent people take the decision of sneaking in the public transport, I suggest changing the framing of criminal behaviour focusing on the losses of the misbehaviour.

Coming back to our example, we might develop marketing campaigns which target is reminding the users of public transport the costs of their possible sneaks. These campaigns might be even more effective, if we stress the direct loss the sneaking behaviour is causing in the salary of the employees of the service. To conclude, I strongly believe, that the pro-social behaviour could be improved if a message of gratitude is displayed (cite required). For instance:

The driver of this train says: “THANKS FOR PAYING YOUR TICKET.”

References

 BVG.de - Homepage. (n.d.). Content. Retrieved March 29, 2014, from http://www.bvg.de/index.php/en/index.html

      Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1986). Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions. The Journal of Business, 59(4), S251–S278.

      Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1991). Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106(4), 1039–1061. doi:10.2307/2937956