“Failure to CAPTCHA Attention: Null Results from an Honesty Priming Experiment in Guatemala”, 2017-04-28 ():
We report results from a large online randomized tax experiment in Guatemala.
The trial involves short messages and choices presented to taxpayers as part of a CAPTCHA pop-up window immediately before they file a tax return, with the aim of priming honest declarations. In total our sample includes 627,242 taxpayers and 3,232,430 tax declarations made over 4 months.
Treatments include: honesty declaration; information about public goods; information about penalties for dishonesty, questions allowing a taxpayer to choose which public good they think tax money should be spent on; or questions allowing a taxpayer to state a view on the penalty for not declaring honestly.
We find no impact of any of these treatments on the average amount of tax declared.
We discuss potential causes for this null effect and implications for ‘online nudges’ around honesty priming.
[Keywords: tax compliance; behavioral economics; randomized field experiments; international development]
[Simplest explanation: the honesty priming experiments were driven in part by fraud, by Francesca Gino & others.]