The 2000 Study That Found Fines Make Parents Later, Not Earlier

In 2000, economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini studied ten Israeli day-care centers that started fining parents for picking up their kids late — and late pickups went up, not down. A penalty meant to punish lateness ended up pricing it instead.

Here’s what happened. Before the fine, picking your kid up on time was a favor to the staff — teachers stayed unpaid past closing, waiting on parents, and showing up late felt like taking advantage of someone. Six of the ten centers then introduced a small fine, a few dollars, for pickups more than ten minutes late. The economists expected lateness to drop. Instead average late pickups roughly doubled within a few weeks and kept climbing.

Gneezy and Rustichini’s explanation is the interesting part. The fine didn’t add a cost to lateness — it replaced a social cost with a smaller financial one. Being late used to mean feeling bad about a teacher stuck waiting on you. Now it meant paying a few dollars for fifteen more minutes, the same way you’d pay for extra parking. The calculus shifted from “I shouldn’t do this to her” to “this costs less than rearranging my afternoon.” A fine is a price, and a price is something you’re allowed to pay.

Worse: when the centers later removed the fine, lateness didn’t drop back to where it started. Parents kept arriving late at the post-fine rate. Once the obligation had been reclassified as a transaction, taking the price tag off didn’t restore the original guilt. You can turn a favor into a purchase. You can’t easily turn it back.

Put that next to a very different study on a penalty-free behavior. In 2008, Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini, and Vladas Griskevicius tested hotel towel reuse. Some rooms got a card asking guests to reuse towels for the environment. Others got a card stating that most previous guests in that specific room had reused theirs. The social-norm card beat the environmental appeal by a wide margin — guests weren’t moved by an abstract value, they were moved by knowing what people who’d stood exactly where they stood had actually done.

The pattern: the daycare fine failed because it let parents convert an obligation into a commodity — pay the price, keep the behavior. The towel card never offered that option. No dollar amount buys your way out of “the last guest in this room did this.” That’s arguably why a public commitment device holds up better than a self-enforced penalty across a lot of unrelated domains — the Beeminder-style akrasia problem is the same failure mode as the daycare fine: a penalty a determined person can just decide to pay isn’t a deterrent, it’s a menu. Systems that instead rely on someone else seeing the outcome, like the witness effect behind waking up on camera, don’t have that escape hatch.

Fines still work in plenty of contexts — this isn’t a case against penalties in general. It’s a narrower point about what a fine specifically does to an obligation that used to run on guilt: it turns a moral decision into an economic one, and economic decisions get shopped around.

Footnote: DontSnooze uses visibility rather than fines — a missed wake-up sends an unflattering photo to your friends instead of charging you anything, on the theory above.