Compliance and accountability: Evidence from a field experiment in Argentina

Krakowski, Krzysztof; Ronconi, Lucas Working Paper Compliance and accountability: Evidence from a field experiment in Argentina IDB Working Paper Series, No. IDB-WP-1476 Provided in Cooperation with: Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC Suggested Citation: Krakowski, Krzysztof; Ronconi, Lucas (2023) : Compliance and accountability: Evidence from a field experiment in Argentina, IDB Working Paper Series, No. IDB-WP-1476, Inter- American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC, https://doi.org/10.18235/0004967 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/289929 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/legalcode Compliance and Accountability: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Argentina Krzysztof Krakowski Lucas Ronconi IDB WORKING PAPER SERIES Nº IDB-WP-1476 June 2023 Department of Research and Chief Economist Inter-American Development Bank June 2023 Compliance and Accountability: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Argentina Krzysztof Krakowski* Lucas Ronconi** * Collegio Carlo Alberto ** University of Buenos Aires, CONICET and IZA Cataloging-in-Publication data provided by the Inter-American Development Bank Felipe Herrera Library Krakowski, Krzysztof. Compliance and accountability: evidence from a field experiment in Argentina / Krzysztof Krakowski, Lucas Ronconi. p. cm. — (IDB Working Paper Series; 1476) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Trust-Argentina. 2. Government accountability-Argentina. 3. Sanctions (Law)- A rgentina. 4. Local transit-Argentina. 5. Compliance. I. Ronconi, Lucas. II. Inter- A merican Development Bank. Department of Research and Chief Economist. III. Title. IV. Series. IDB-WP-1476 Copyright © Inter-American Development Bank. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/ legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose, as provided below. No derivative work is allowed. Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. 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The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent. http://www.iadb.org 2023 Abstract* Does compliance with low-cost civic duties increase demand for social accountability? We address this question by conducting a field experiment at train stations in Buenos Aires. We create exogenous variation in compliance with paying the public transportation fare by i) highlighting sanctions for non-compliance and ii) appealing to compliance norms whereby 90 percent of passengers pay the fare. We find that both sanctions and norms treatments raise compliance. However, only appeals to compliance norms make treated passengers more willing to sign a petition demanding quality public transportation service—our measure of demand for social accountability. To probe the mechanisms explaining these patterns, we show that compliance invoked by adherence to norms makes subjects feel more entitled to demand accountability and trust the government to respect this right to a greater extent. Our findings suggest that raising compliance through appeals to social norms may thus have wider benefits for civic behaviors. JEL classifications: D91, H26, O12 Keywords: Compliance, Accountability, Norms, Sanctions, Argentina * The authors are grateful to Luca Andriani, Daniel Auer, Ruben Durante, Diego Gambetta, Philipp Keefer, Siegwart Lindenberg, Andres López, Gabriel Montes-Rojas, Gian Luca Pasin, Juan Pedro Ronconi, Martin Rossi, Andris Saulitis, Carlos Scartascini, Merlin Schaeffer, Aron Székely, and other colleagues attending seminars at the Inter- American Development Bank, University of Buenos Aires, University of San Andrés, Utrecht University (Annual Conference of Experimental Sociology), and London School of Economics and Political Science (International Behavioural Public Policy Conference) for feedback. The study has been financially supported by the Latin America and the Caribbean Research Network of the Inter-American Development Bank as part of the project “Increasing Trust in Latin America and the Caribbean” and received ethical approval from Universidad de San Martín. Agustin Berasategui, Ana Albin, Sofia Chavez, Denise Falah, Lautaro Calcagno, Alan Groisman, Lisa Pérez, and Lucas Otameno provided excellent research assistance. Author contact information: Krzysztof Krakowski ([email protected]); Lucas Ronconi ([email protected]). 2 1. Introduction A common paradox of many developing states is that they need revenues more badly than developed states yet do a much poorer job of collecting taxes (Akitoby et al., 2020). One obvious answer to this puzzle is that developing states lack capacity to enforce compliance, which might perpetuate the vicious circle of underdevelopment. However, this explanation is not consistent with the observation that many developing states are fairly capable of exercising tight authoritarian control through repression and surveillance (Hager and Krakowski, 2022), while others voluntarily refrain from collecting (some) taxes by offering a broad range of goods and services for free (Holland, 2015; Chaudhry, 1997; Rawlings and Rubio, 2005). Another answer to the puzzle points to deliberate choice of not enforcing compliance by some developing states. In doing so, these states could undermine citizens’ right to demand social accountability. Consequently, their governments may go unpunished for delivering bad governance and (possibly) engaging in corruption (Paler, 2013; Weigel, 2020). Political historians have long argued that European monarchs who needed tax revenue had to cede political control in exchange for tax compliance (North and Weingast, 1989; Tilly et al., 1992). Conversely, in rentier states, leaders are known to provide goods to citizens for free in exchange for political quiescence (Holland, 2015; Chaudhry, 1997; Waterbury, 1997; Beblawi and Luciani, 1987). Are non-compliant citizens less likely to demand accountability? We address this question through a novel field experiment that exogenously raises compliance with low-cost civic duties: payment for a train ticket (see Dai et al., 2018). We conduct our experiment at metro train stations located in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. To raise compliance with fare payment, we appeal to the fear of sanctions and invoke adherence to compliance norms, which have been documented as the most common reasons for people to comply with their basic civic duties around the world.1 We measure demand for social accountability by eliciting citizens’ willingness to sign a petition demanding quality public transportation service. The petition requests the enforcement of the obligation that the public transportation administration has to provide a minimum of services even during strikes, as stipulated by Article 24 of Argentine Law 25877. Why could compliance breed demand for accountability? We hypothesize that the process follows the “taxation-produces-representation” logic (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz, 2006). The cost- 1 See, e.g., Alm et al. (2017), Hallsworth (2014), Bursztyn et al. (2019), Saulitis (2023). Appendix A.1. provides a detailed discussion on the compliance literature. 3 benefit model (Bates and Donald Lien, 1985), in which citizens care about the price they pay for the government services they receive, predicts that an exogenous increase in the propensity to pay would produce a higher demand for quality public services. Put differently, compliant citizens should be more strongly motivated to invest resources in monitoring the provision of public services and thus hold service providers accountable. However, the “taxation-produces-representation” logic hinges on the underlying reciprocity mechanism and assumes that actors trust each other to do their part by providing rights in exchange for duties, or vice versa (see Ortega et al., 2016). Based on this premise, we expect that demand for accountability should only increase in response to compliance motivated by reciprocity concerns—embodied in the belief that everyone should do their part, as indirectly invoked by our norms treatment (Lindenberg et al., 2021). The sanctions treatment, by contrast, could signal that if a sanction needs to be highlighted, then perhaps others are not following the norm, thus undermining the expectations of reciprocity and related accountability. We test this hypothesis by creating exogenous variation in compliance through sanctions and reciprocity channels independently. We do so thanks to a novel experimental protocol, to which we turn next. 2. Design 2.1 Setting We conducted a field experiment at metro train stations in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area between October 4 and December 17, 2021. We exposed metro commuters traveling towards the periphery of the city to messages meant to induce them to pay for the metro ticket. To make readership of the message high, we placed a research assistant at the entry of the train station wearing a T-shirt with the treatment message and handing out flyers to passengers with the same message (see the lower panel of Figure 1 below). Figure 1 represents a typical train station and shows where each of the research assistants (RA) is located. RA1 is located at the entrance, several meters before passengers decide whether to pay or dodge the fare by entering the platform through the “emergency” door. RA1 delivers the treatment message combining a flyer and T-shirt. (Figure A1 in the Appendix shows some real train stations.) RA2 counts how many people entered the platform through the turnstile (pay fare) and how many people entered through the “emergency” door (dodge the fare). RAs 3 and 4 are in 4 the platform and conduct a follow-up survey with the population of people who entered the platform.2 2.2 Types of Treatment We increase compliance through different channels (fear of sanctions vs. reciprocity concerns) by using two treatment messages which remind passengers that: i) there is a fine in case of evading the ticket (Evite Multas) and ii) most passengers buy the ticket (90% de los Pasajeros Pagan Boleto).3 The control group is exposed to a research assistant without any message. Each treatment (RA with T-shirt + flyer) lasts for one hour and 15 minutes and is then replaced by another treatment. We assign treatments to station-time units on a rotation basis, using different sequences on different dates (more details on our treatments schedule are available in Appendix A.2). Figure 1. Experimental Set-up 2 Throughout the fieldwork, we vary the gender of RAs in specific roles. RAs 3 and 4 interview every third passenger entering the platform except for people who looked unambiguously older than 65 years, younger than 16 years, handicapped or wear a police uniform. We excluded these groups because people younger than 16 cannot sign petitions and may be exempt from fare payment (e.g., school children). Likewise, most people older than 65 are pensioners who receive the minimum benefit and do not have to pay the transportation fare. Handicapped individuals and police personnel on duty are also exempt. 3 This is an estimation of the share of total passengers of public transportation that pay their tickets in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. It includes subway and bus passengers (where fare dodging is almost impossible), and metro train passengers travelling to Buenos Aires downtown, where it is also very difficult to leave the terminal station without paying the fare. 5 Figure 1, continued Notes: The upper panel shows the experimental set-up, outlining the position of our research assistants, those delivering the treatment and those collecting compliance and survey data. The lower panel shows one of our research assistant while he delivers Treatment 1 that appeals to norms (on the left) and Treatment 2 that appeals to the fear of sanctions (on the right). 2.3 Sample There are more than 150 stations on the seven train lines in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, as shown in Figure A2 in the Appendix. We randomly select train stations, and assign them to each date, from the population of stations that ex ante meet the conditions for conducting conduct the experiment. Each week we cover a different train line. Our original plan was to visit one station per day over 11 weeks (i.e., 55 train stations). In some cases, however, a revenue protection officer arrived at the train station while we were conducting the experiment, closed the emergency door, and actively enforced fare payment. Under these circumstances, passengers did not have the option of dodging the fare. The conditions for conducting the experiment were therefore not fulfilled, and we thus immediately ended the experiment and moved to a different train station. In sum, we collect data on 62 different train stations (Appendix A.3 provides a full list and a map). 12 services after paying the transportation fare because they plausibly recognize the reciprocal logic of this exchange: rights in return for duties, and vice versa. Our key contribution is micro evidence on the “taxation produces representation” hypothesis and its underlying mechanism (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz, 2006). To the best of our knowledge, our study provides rare causal evidence supporting this proposition with reference to a domain of everyday compliance.7 We are aware that compliance with civic duties and social accountability includes many actions that are certainly costlier than paying a train ticket or signing a petition. However, we focused on this outcome because it is malleable to weak informational treatments. Our study thus provides evidence-based policy recommendation on cheap and potentially scalable ways of improving everyday forms of compliance and their effect on publicspiritedness at large. 7 A variant of this hypothesis that focuses on voting behavior have been more widely studied with the use of (quasi-) experimental methods (see, e.g., Ross, 2004; Paler, 2013; Weigel, 2020). 13 References Akitoby, B., J. Honda, and K. Primus. 2020. “Tax Revenues in Fragile and Conflict-Affected States: Why Are They Low and How Can We Raise Them?” IMF Working Papers 2020- 143. Washington, DC, United States: International Monetary Fund. Alm, J., K.M. Bloomquist, and M. McKee. 2017. “When You Know Your Neighbour Pays Taxes: Information, Peer Effects and Tax Compliance.” Fiscal Studies 38(4): 587–613. Beblawi, H., and G. Luciani, editors. 1987. The Rentier State: Nation, State and Integration in the Arab World. Volume 2. London, United Kingdom: Routledge Kegan & Paul. Bates, R.H., and D.-H. Donald Lien. 1985. “A Note on Taxation, Development, and Representative Government.” Politics & Society 14(1): 53–70. Bicchieri, C. 2005. The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Bursztyn, L. et al. 2019. “Moral Incentives in Credit Card Debt Repayment: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” Journal of Political Economy 127(4): 1641–1683. Chaudhry, K.A. 1997. The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East. Ithaca, United States: Cornell University Press. Croson, R., and U. Gneezy. 2009. “Gender Differences in Preferences.” Journal of Economic Literature 47(2): 448–474. Dai, Z., F. Galeotti, and M.C. Villeval. 2018. “Cheating in the Lab Predicts Fraud in the Field: An Experiment in Public Transportation.” Management Science 64(3): 1081–1100. Fehr, E., and S. Gächter. 1998. “Reciprocity and Economics: The Economic Implications of Homo Reciprocans.” European Economic Review 42(3-5): 845–859. Hager, A., and K. Krakowski. 2022. “Does State Repression Spark Protests? Evidence from Secret Police Surveillance in Communist Poland.” American Political Science Review 116(2): 564–579. Hallsworth, M. 2014. “The Use of Field Experiments to Increase Tax Compliance.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 30(4): 658–679. Heckman, J.J. 1976. “The Common Structure of Statistical Models of Truncation, Sample Selection and Limited Dependent Variables and a Simple Estimator for Such Models.” In: S.V. Berg, editor. Annals of Economic and Social Measurement. Volume 5, Number 4. Cambridge, United States: National Bureau of Economic Research. 14 Holland, A.C. 2015. “The Distributive Politics of Enforcement.” American Journal of Political Science 59(2): 357–371. Lindenberg, S., F. Six, and K. Keizer. 2021. “Social Contagion and Goal Framing: The Sustainability of Rule Compliance.” In: B. van Rooij and D.D. Sokol, editors. Cambridge Handbook of Compliance. 422–437. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Mutz, D.C., and A. H.-Y. Lee. 2020. “How Much Is One American Worth? How Competition Affects Trade Preferences.” American Political Science Review 114(4): 1179–1194. North, D.C., and B.R. Weingast. 1989. “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England.” Journal of Economic History 49(4): 803–832. Ortega, D., L. Ronconi, and P. Sanguinetti. 2016. “Reciprocity and Willingness to Pay Taxes: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Latin America.” Economía 16(2): 55–87. Paler, L. 2013. “Keeping the Public Purse: An Experiment in Windfalls, Taxes, and the Incentives to Restrain Government.” American Political Science Review 107(4): 706–725. Peruzzotti, E., and C. Smulovitz. 2006. Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in the New Latin American Democracies. Pittsburgh, United States: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rawlings, L.B., and G.M. Rubio. 2005. “Evaluating the Impact of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs.” World Bank Research Observer 20(1): 29–55. Ross, M.L. 2004. “Does Taxation Lead to Representation?” British Journal of Political Science 34(2), 229–249. Saulitis, A. 2023. “Nudging Debtors with Non-Performing Loans: Evidence from Three Field Experiments.” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance 37: 100776. Tilly, C. et al. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992. Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Oxford. Waterbury, J. 1997. “Fortuitous By-products.” Comparative Politics 29(3): 383–402. Weigel, J.L. 2020. “The Participation Dividend of Taxation: How Citizens in Congo Engage More with the State When It Tries to Tax Them.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 135(4): 1849– 1903. 15 Appendix A.1 Review of the Literature on Compliance The literature on compliance has identified two broad categories of explanations of why people comply with their civic duties.8 These explanations relate to i) sanctions and ii) reciprocity and normative concerns. The first explanation proposes that people comply with civic duties if their non-compliance could be easily detected and punished by legal authorities (Alm et al., 2012; Alm, 2012; Kirchler et al., 2008; Ritsatos, 2014; Torgler and Werner, 2005; Katz and Owen, 2013; Riahi- Belkaoui, 2004). The second explanation posits that people comply with civic duties because they trust the government to convert their compliance into a basis for a well-functioning society that provides high-quality services to its citizenry (Nurkholis et al., 2020; Andriani, 2016; Chan et al., 2017; Daude et al., 2012; Ortega et al., 2016; Torgler, 2003; Levi and Stoker, 2000; Hosseini Kondelaji et al., 2016; Ibrahim et al., 2015; Leonardo, 2011). Another version of this explanations suggests that people comply with civic duties because they are influenced by social and moral norms of their communities that stigmatize non-compliance and other forms of uncivic behavior (Andreoni et al., 1998; Falk and Fischbacher, 2006; Fergusson et al., 2019; Alm et al., 2017; Ritsatos, 2014; Kirchler et al., 2010; Frey and Torgler, 2007; Pruckner and Sausgruber, 2013). Based on the above findings, a series of field experiments has tested the effectiveness of low-cost “nudging” interventions that authorities could use to increase civic compliance through the above channels. Most commonly, these interventions focus on activating the fear of sanctions or appealing to cooperative social norms (Hallsworth, 2014). Castro and Scartascini (2015), for example, find that authorities can increase tax compliance by 5 percentage points by simply emphasizing possible fines related to tax evasion. Hallsworth et al. (2017), in turn, find that appeals to social norms of compliance can allow tax authorities to improve overdue tax collection by a margin of 2-5 percentage points. Other interventions aimed at triggering the reciprocity mechanism directly (e.g., Coleman, 1996; Slemrod et al., 2001; Dickson et al., 2017; González-Navarro and Quintana-Domeque, 2015). They did so by altering citizens’ beliefs about the (in)capacity of the state to transform civic compliance into a basis of a well-functioning society. In some lab experiments, for example, 8 For a recent review, see Mascagni (2018). 16 participants were informed that all tax revenues a central authority were about to collect were going to be destroyed (Andrighetto et al., 2016; Steinmo and D’Attoma, 2021). In other (field) experiments, public service provision was improved through incentives or additional funding (Armand et al., 2021). The key difference between appeals to sanctions and social norms lies in the source of norms these interventions refer to. The sanctions approach relies on formal, legal norms, threatening people with audits and fines in the case of non-compliance. The social norms approach, in turn, draws on informal norms, creating peer pressure to conform with civic behaviors of the majority of citizens. The sanctions approach is thus based on threatening messages, evoking fear as a key emotion. The social norms approach, by contrast, relies on more positive messages that induce emotions of guilt or shame in the case of non-compliance (see Elster, 1999). The literature has compared the relative effectiveness of sanctions and social norms approaches, finding the former to work better (see Hallsworth, 2014; Horodnic, 2018; Dularif and Rustiarini, 2021). Yet, these comparisons focused on the effects of nudging interventions on inducing compliance in specific domains for which these interventions were designed. Nonetheless, the compliance-inducing interventions can have spillover effects in other domains as well (Altmann et al., 2021). Nudging citizens to repay hospital debts at time t can potentially affect their repayment of other debts or the repayment of similar debts at time t + 1. To the best of our knowledge, these spillover effects have not yet been tested—a task we undertake in the present study. One important mechanism through which compliance-inducing interventions in one domain may have spillover effects on other domains of civic life is the accountability logic. According to the “taxation-produces-representation” hypothesis, an exogenous increase in the propensity to pay taxes would produce a higher demand for quality services (Ross, 2004; Peruzzotti and Smulovitz, 2006). Simply put, citizens who comply with civic duties do not want their efforts to be wasted. They thus assume larger responsibility in their societies by engaging in other types of civic behaviors and monitoring public-spiritedness of fellow citizens and their governors (see also Ronconi, 2019). Importantly, if the accountability mechanism drives the hypothesized spillover effects, one may expect the social norms approach should be more effective in increasing civic behaviors across multiple domains, compared to the sanctions approach. For one, the social norms approach 17 highlights the collective commitment to comply with civic duties, thus raising the expected efficacy of individual contributions. Note that civic engagement is a collective action in which the value of a single contribution increases with the volume of others’ contributions. As a result, people tend to cooperate conditionally on others’ cooperation (Bicchieri, 2005). The sanctions approach, by contrast, could signal to citizens that if a sanction needs to be highlighted, then perhaps this is because others are not following the norm, thus undermining the expectations of reciprocity and related accountability. Figure A1. Beccar (upper panel) and Morón (lower panel) Train Stations Notes: The pictures show two metro train stations located in Greater Buenos Aires (Beccar and Morón) where the experiment was conducted. Note the turnstiles and the open door nearby. 18 Figure A2. Map of the Buenos Aires Commuter Rail Network 19 A.2 Schedule We developed the following schedule. On the first day, we began the morning shift (9:00 AM to 1:00 PM) with T1, then T2, and finally C; and repeated the same sequence during the second shift (2:00 PM to 6:00 PM). The sequence for the second day was T2, C, T1; for the third day C, T1, T2; and so on. Table A1 shows the treatments during the first week of work. Table A1. Types of Treatments Included in Our Vignettes Schedule Monday Station 1 Tuesday Station 2 Wednesday Station 3 Thursday Station 4 Friday Station 5 9:00 - 10:15 AM T1 T2 C T1 T2 10:20 - 11:35 AM T2 C T1 T2 C 11:40 - 12:55 AM C T1 T2 C T1 Lunch 2:00 - 3:15 PM T1 T2 C T1 T2 3:20 - 4:35 PM T2 C T1 T2 C 4:40 - 5:55 PM C T1 T2 C T1 A.3 Experimental Venues We conducted our experiment at the following train stations: A. Devoto, Acassuso, Ardigo, Artigas, Ballester, Banfield, Beccar, Bella Vista, C. Univ., Caballito, Calzada, Carranza, Castelar, Ciudadela, Claypole, Coghlan, Colegiales, Don Bosco, Drago, Ejército Andes, El Jagüel, Ezpeleta, F. Beiro, F. Moreno, F. Varela, Floresta, Fournier, Glew, Guillón, Hurlingham, Independencia, Ingenieros, Ituzaingo, Juan B. Justo, La Lucila, Lanús, Lourdes, Lynch, M. Coronado, Martínez, Miguelete, Morón, Muñiz, Núñez, Padua, Paso del Rey, Podestá, Pueyrredón, Quilmes, Ramos Mejía, Rubén Darío, San Andrés, San Isidro, Tropezón, Turdera, Urquiza, V. Dominico, Vicente López, Villa España, Virreyes, W. Morris, and Wilde. 20 Figure A3. Map of Train Stations Where We Conducted the Experiment Notes: Brown circles indicate locations of our intervention. A.4 Ethics and Pre-registration While the project was approved by the ethics committee’s review at the Universidad de San Martín (Buenos Aires, Argentina), it was not formally pre-registered. We did not do so because we were working under very strict time constraints in the implementation of the experiment related to the Covid-19 pandemic and could not find time to pre-register the study before the roll-out of our intervention. We believe that the lack of pre-registration in this case does not undermine the transparency and validity of our findings because of two main reasons. First, a research proposal (that is, a file similar to a pre-analysis plan) was made available to the public on the funding agency’s website (Latin American and Caribbean Research Network) in 2019, and the file is still available. Our hypotheses, treatments, and measurement strategies are all described there and have not changed in the current manuscript. Second, the main objective of the project is to contribute to the design of public policies on a topic where little is known; thus, combining a deductive and inductive approach was deemed 21 convenient and justifiable. In this spirit, we made one change to the ongoing experiment, which we transparently report in the main text and describe in detail below. The research proposal was written in late 2019 (before the pandemic), but the field experiment started in October 2021 in Argentina, immediately after the reduction in Covid cases made it possible. In the spirit of inductive learning, we made one important adjustment during the data collection process in the spirit of inductive learning. Instead of running the proposed experiment during all of the 11 weeks, we decided to change one question during the last three weeks of the data collection in order to conduct a falsification test. During the initial eight weeks we asked whether the passenger was willing to sign a petition demanding the enforcement of a law which stipulates that a minimum of public transportation service should be provided even during strikes; while during the last three weeks we asked the passengers whether they were willing to sign a petition demanding the prohibition of using animals for experimental purposes (details in Appendix A.5). We made the adjustment to gain confidence about the appropriateness of the excludability restriction. Together with this modification, we also replaced the question on trust in the government that we had in our survey instrument during the initial eight weeks with another item that captures our proposed mechanism: perceived entitlement to demand quality public service (which we implemented in the final three weeks). We report these changes transparently in the main body of the paper. A.5 Outcome Questions Wording (in Spanish) Main outcome: “Buen día. Soy estudiante de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, ¿está dispuesto o no a firmar esta petición solicitando que el Estado garantice el funcionamiento mínimo de transporte público aun en caso de huelga?” [referring to Argentine Law 25877, article 24] Falsification outcome: “Buen día. Soy estudiante de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, ¿está dispuesto o no a firmar esta petición solicitando que el Estado prohíba los experimentos con animales para el desarrollo de productos domésticos y medicamentos?” 28 A.11 Falsification Tests Table A5. Treatment, Compliance, and Signing Animal Rights Petition (falsification test) (1) (2) (3) Reduced IV = T1 IV = T2 form Sanctions Norms T1_Sanctions 0.024 (0.033) T2_Norms 0.005 (0.033) Paid_ticket 0.200 0.011 (0.353) (0.283) Controls Yes Yes Yes N 1146 748 772 Notes: Robust standard errors in parenthesis. Significance level shown below: *p<0.10, ** p<0.05, ***p<0.01. Figure A6. Falsification Test in the Online Experiment Notes: The figure shows the comparison of means of signing the petition across treatment conditions in the follow-up online experiment. Respondents were recruited among students of the University of Buenos Aires (N=154). 29 Figure A7. Treatment Messages Conveyed as a Preview of Lottery Prizes Notes: The figure shows the T-shirts that participants of the follow-up survey could win in a lottery. They served as our informational treatments in the online experiment. The upper-left T-shirt shows the control message; the upper-right T-shirt shows the T1 (sanctions) message; the bottom T-shirt shows the T2 (norms) message. A.12 Heterogeneity Analyses Figure A8. Treatment, Compliance, and Signing the Petition (heterogeneity along neighborhood’s wealth) Notes: The figure shows the point-estimates and the accompanying 90/95 confidence intervals (thick and thin lines, respectively) of the regression of signing the petition on treatment conditions conditional on neighborhood’s wealth (approximated with night-time lights). The left panel shows the effects of T1 Sanctions treatment (vis-à-vis control), while the right panel shows the effects of T2 Norms treatment. 30 Figure A9. Treatment, Compliance, and Signing the Petition (heterogeneity along neighborhood’s population density) Notes: The figure shows the point-estimates and the accompanying 90/95 confidence intervals (thick and thin lines, respectively) of the regression of signing the petition on treatment conditions conditional on neighborhood’s population density. The left panel shows the effects of T1 Sanctions treatment (vis-á-vis control), while the right panel shows the effects of T2 Norms treatment. Figure A10. Treatment, Compliance, and Signing the Petition (heterogeneity along gender) Notes: The figure shows the point-estimates and the accompanying 90/95 confidence intervals (thick and thin lines, respectively) of the regression of signing the petition on treatment conditions conditional on respondents’ gender. 31 References Alm, J. 2012. “Measuring, Explaining, and Controlling Tax Evasion: Lessons from Theory, Experiments, and Field Studies.” International Tax and Public Finance 19(1): 54–77. 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