[Feb 5<sup>th</sup> 2018]
**Differences from the pre-registration**
- after the beginning of the experiment, it became clear that the attention manipulation was too weak to meaningfully affect cashiers' behavior and the experimental manipulation was, therefore, dropped from the study
- values of the purchases were from the interval <20, 60> instead of the planned <30, 50>
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**Introduction**
Most experiments in psychology and economics exploring the prevalence and determinants of cheating are carried out in a laboratory-setting, often with participants from student population. In these artificial conditions, people can cheat by overstating their performance in knowledge tests or simple mathematical tasks or by overstating their earnings in games of chance based on dice rolling or coin tossing (Mazar, Ariely 2008; Fischbacher, Föllmi-Heus 2013).
Critics point out that the results obtained using these methods are not generalizable: they may be specific for the student population, the used tasks or laboratory environments. However, experiments in real conditions are rather scarce (eg. Balafoutas et al. 2013; Castillo et al. 2014; Djawadi Fahr 2015).
The proposed design aims to measure the actual prevalence of cheating in the real world of actual transactions in which the opportunity to act dishonestly naturally appears. Previously identified determinants of cheating will be examined: for example the time of day (Kouchaki, Smith 2013), gender (Erat, Gneezy 2012; Muehlheusser et al. 2015), and the likelihood of discovery of cheating.
**References**
Castillo, M., et al. 2014. LOST IN THE MAIL: A FIELD EXPERIMENT ON CRIME. Economic Inquiry. 2014, Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 285-303.
Djawadi, B. M., & Fahr, R. (2015). “…and they are really lying”: Clean evidence on the pervasiveness of cheating in professional contexts from a field experiment. Journal of Economic Psychology, 48(0), 48-59. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2015.03.002
Erat, S., Gneezy, U. White lies, Manage. Science, 58 (4) (2012), pp. 723–733.
Fischbacher, U., Föllmi‐Heusi, F. Lies in disguise—an experimental study on cheating Journal of the European Economic Association, 11 (3) (2013), pp. 525–547.
Loukas Balafoutas, Adrian Beck, Rudolf Kerschbamer, Matthias Sutter, What drives taxi drivers? A field experiment on fraud in a market for credence goods The Review of Economic Studies, 80 (3) (2013), pp. 876–891.
Maryam, K., Smith, I., H. "The Morning Morality Effect The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior." Psychological science.
Mazar, N., Amir, O., Ariely, D. The dishonesty of honest people: A theory of self-concept maintenance Journal of Marketing Research, 45 (6) (2008), pp. 633–644.
Muehlheusser, G., Roider, A., & Wallmeier, N. (2015). Gender differences in honesty: Groups versus individuals. Economics Letters, 128(0), 25-29. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2014.12.019
