It reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story of a daycare that got tired of parents picking their kids up late. They decided to start charging a fee every time a parent was late to pick up. Once they did, parents were actually more likely to pick their kids up late. Presumably because they figured they were paying for the privilege.

$1/min = paying for the privilege

My kids’ old preschool must have read Freakonomics and instead charged $5/min. My wife once fell asleep and was charged $90 for being 18 min late (I got a call at 6). At least it wasn’t $5/min/kid (2 kids).

Mostly, if parents were running late, they’d ask another parent to check out their kid and watch them for a few.

There’s the real incentive. If you don’t show up some other weirdo parent has access to your kid.

Not apocryphal :)

https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/what-makes-people-do-what-t...

Well it’s not it the protestant bible, so it’s not canon, but it’s not part of the apocrypha either. I just don’t know.

Why doubt the claim? It is initially counter intuitive but actually makes sense if you think about it.

In any case, it’s not just a story, it is described in this paper:

https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine...

I was making a dumb comment about the use of the word apocryphal. I thought I was clever last night.

I’ve read about the daycare fines before and didn’t have reason to doubt it any more or less than other anecdotes I’ve read. The paper you linked seems like pretty good evidence that it actually happened — assuming the rest of the paper supports the abstract.