Global Inspection Games (GIG) in the laboratory

Sanchez Villalba (2015) claims inspection games can be modelled as global games when agents face common shocks. For the tax evasion game -his leading example- he prescribes that the tax agency should audit each individual taxpayer with a probability that is a non-decreasing function of every other taxpayer's declarations ("relative auditing strategy"). This paper uses experimental data to test the predictions of the model and finds supporting evidence for the hypothesis that the relative auditing strategy is superior to the alternative "cut-off" one. It also finds that data fit the qualitative predictions of the global game model, regarding both participants' decisions and the experiment's comparative statics.