It's Time to Cheat!

We test the correlation between time preferences and cheating at the individual level. In our experiment, cheating increases the earnings of those who commit it and only entails a moral cost. We are the first to measure both the propensity to cheat and time preferences at the individual level, determining whether or not cheaters are more likely to be more present-biased or to have a higher discount factor. We observe widespread cheating and that cheating prevails among subjects who display present bias and overconfidence. Interestingly, a non-negligible fraction of the cheaters we observe is not driven by monetary reward