Civic honesty around the globe

1. Contact information should not be just an email address. It’s better to have email, phone and any locally popular communication channels. In countries such as China, people don’t use email as often as apps like wechat. Desk clerks are less likely to register an email address to return a wallet, especially when it doesn’t have anything valuable inside.

2. The difference between money and no-money percentage may be a better indicator of civil honesty. The absolute percentage reflects more about a “I’ll wait for someone to come” or “not my business” attitude of desk clerks.

3. It is better to put something important to the owner but not everyone else in the wallet, such as a driver license or national ID card. This could reduce “not my business” factor.

Thanks for your comments.

1. This is a fair point. In the Supplemental Material, we explore cross-country differences in email usage. When we statistically adjust for country-level differences in email usage (using World Bank data), the country ranking remains essentially the same (adjusted rankings correlate over 0.90 with non-adjusted rankings). Also, when you restrict the data only to drop-offs performed at hotels -- which tend to rely on email more than other settings -- you see the same pattern of results.

2. Also a good point. However, there are mechanical problems with using the marginal differences between conditions -- for example, countries with high reporting rates in the NoMoney condition will be naturally capped in the possible size of the treatment treatment effect, compared to those with low reporting rates. Because the scale is bounded at 0 and 100% you're also fighting against reversion to the mean at the low and high ends of the distribution. FWIW we find that absolute levels of reporting rates correlate very highly with other known proxies of honesty both within and between countries (measures like tax evasion, corruption, etc), whereas relative differences between conditions do not.

3. We explicitly test this by randomly varying whether the wallets contained a key or not (valuable to the owner but not the recipient), while holding the rest of the contents in the wallet constant.

The world bank tells you half of the Chinese firms have emails but you won't know that far less than that of them ARE WILLING to use it. For taxing, they use super informal wechat group to send around notifications. I doubted if my tax officer remembers his email or has it at all. Regression adjustment or group it as outlier you know the best.

For hotels, I had experience that a 5-star hotel responded my message after almost a month. They have it but not in your way of using it.

Anyway, did you know the reason for their not writing that email?