Cheating on a Budget

An underexplored class of social dilemmas revolves around a shared resource pool with privately observed entitlements, making the resource susceptible to dishonest overclaiming. To study these dilemmas, we introduce a novel four-player game that permits individuals to claim more than their entitlement. Two fundamental alternatives that often arise involve participants submitting claims simultaneously (e.g., municipal department budgets, public-housing and university-dorm allocations), or sequentially (e.g., food pantries, community fridges, player negotiations on salary-capped sports teams). Motivated by such cases, our experimental design contrasts simultaneous and sequential reporting as well as plentiful and limited budgets. We find that simultaneous reporting reduces dishonesty when resources are plentiful and promotes greater equity when resources are limited. Under sequential moves with limited resources, Player 4 frequently protests the inequity by choosing to earn zero rather than the remaining budget. Our results demonstrate that these social dilemmas can be better managed by employing simultaneous reporting structures, which obscure information about individual claims.