Bad Apples Spoil the Fun: Quantifying Cheating in Online Gaming

Abstract

Understanding and quantifying the factors that lead to cheating in society is problematic, due to the inherent desire to hide socially unacceptable actions. While significant progress has been made in the understanding of unethical behavior via in-lab experiments, little was measured at scale, in the wild. By analyzing cheating in online games, this paper verifies at scale and in the wild a number of previous observations drew from controlled, in-lab experiments. We verify empirically that cheating behavior is contagious, and identify some of the factors that encourage cheating and some that limit it.