Do negative incentives encourage stealing?

Preliminary version- please do not quote Beckers (1968) deterrence hypothesis postulates that crime rates (weakly) decrease in "negative incentives", i.e. the severity of punishment and the detection probability. In sharp contrast, a growing empirical literature docu-ments that small incentives often back\u85re by crowding out intrinsic motivation to behave in a socially desired way. We conduct a neutrally framed labora-tory experiment to test whether negative incentives work. In our experiment, subjects can steal from other participantspayo¤s. Di¤erent treatments vary by the severity of punishment and the detection probability. Our aggregate results clearly reject the deterrence hypothesis: except for very high levels of incentives, on average subjects steal more the higher the negative incentives. However, our results are well in line with crowding out of fairness concerns