An Initial Analysis of the Contextual Information Available within Auction Posts on Contract Cheating Agency Websites

The advantages of using contextual information in order to detect contract cheating attempts by students have not yet been fully explored in the academic literature. Contract cheating occurs when a student uses a third party to produce assessed work for them. This paper focuses on contract cheating using agency websites, where an auction type process is used by students to select a contractor to have the assessed work produced for them, often at a financially advantageous price. Currently, the process of finding contract cheating on agency sites is manually intensive, with a detective required to investigate and attribute each cheating attempt. This paper aims to formally identify the context internally and externally available for contract cheating posts on an agency website. The paper is offered as a starting point for academics interested in producing an automated intelligent contextually-aware tool to detect contract cheating

Turnaround time and market capacity in contract cheating

Contract cheating is the process whereby students auction off the opportunity for others to complete assignments for them. It is an apparently widespread yet under-researched problem. One suggested strategy to prevent contract cheating is to shorten the turnaround time between the release of assignment details and the submission date, thus making it difficult for students to make arrangements with contractors. Here, we outline some characteristics of the current market for contract cheating and demonstrate that short turnaround times are unlikely to prevent contract cheating because requested turnaround times for university-level assignments completed via contract cheating are already short (average 5 days). In addition, for every contractor awarded a job, there are an average of 10 others offering to complete it within the specified time suggesting that there is abundant excess capacity in the market

Moral Hazard, Targeting and Contract Duration in Agri-Environmental Policy

This paper extends the multi-period agri-environmental contract model of Fraser (2004) so that it contains a more realistic specification of the inter-temporal penalties for non-compliance, and therefore of the inter-temporal moral hazard problem in agri-environmental policy design. On this basis it is shown that a farmer will have an unambiguous preference for cheating early over cheating late in the contract period based on differences in the expected cost of compliance. It is then shown how the principal can make use of this unambiguous preference to target monitoring resources intertemporally, and in so doing, to encourage full contract duration compliance.Moral Hazard, Contract Duration, Agri-Environmental Policy, Targeting, Agribusiness, Environmental Economics and Policy, Q15, Q18, Q58,

An Observational Analysis of the Range and Extent of Contract Cheating from Online Courses Found on Agency Websites

Although online courses can provide access to higher education through e-learning systems which would not otherwise be available for students, they also pose challenges for academic integrity. Paramount to this is contract cheating, where students have been observed paying other people to complete work for them to complete their online courses. This paper analyses attempts by students at contract cheating using Transtutors.com, which is a billed as a site for homework support. A sample of 174 online assignments found on Transtutors.com are analysed and traced back to 17 online universities. Assignments from online institutions are demonstrated to be a particular problem for contract cheating detectives, since notifying staff at those institutions of attempts by their students to cheat has proved to be difficult or impossible. The paper concludes by looking at the wider issues posed by online contract cheating and the opportunities for automated detection within this field

University students are buying assignments – what could, or should, be done about it?

‘Contract cheating’, whereby students pay companies to complete assignments on their behalf, threatens to seriously undermine higher education standards. Philip M. Newton and Michael J. Draper consider what might be done to tackle this issue, including the Quality Assurance Agency’s suggestion of deploying the UK Fraud Act (2006). While questions remains as to whether the Fraud Act is likely to prove effective in prosecuting companies that offer contract cheating services, it may be that other legal approaches can be adopted. Additionally, more robust assessment designs and university regulations, together with renewed programmes of stakeholder education, can mitigate the threats posed by contract cheating

Commentary

Enforceable promises discourage lying, cheating, and stealing. Contracts that embody such promises shape institutions, distribute power, and organize markets. The Smith-King critique of elite empirical contracts scholarship reveals a field preoccupied with the first set of functions and barely interested in the second. I am loath to second-guess this view without empirical evidence of my own. Instead, I draw from it two sets of implications-one for the substantive study of contracts, the other for the relationship between contract theory and contract empiricism

Moral Hazard, Targeting and Contract Duration in Agri-Environmental Policy

This paper extends the multi-period agri-environmental contract model of Fraser (2004) so that it contains a more realistic specification of the inter-temporal penalties for noncompliance, and therefore of the inter-temporal moral hazard problem in agri-environmental policy design. On this basis it is shown that a farmer will have an unambiguous preference for cheating early over cheating late in the contract period based on differences in the expected cost of compliance. It is then shown how the principal can make use of this unambiguous preference to target monitoring resources intertemporally, and in so doing, to encourage full contract duration compliance.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Can Liars Ever Prosper.

The paper compares the optimal financial contracts of a firm which has private information over its expost revenues when the finance can be provided by either a single or two groups of investors. When they are the only investors we use a financial contract with non-contractible monitoring, in which the probabilities of cheating by the entrepreneur/firm and monitoring by investors are mutual best responses. The contract is written by the entrepreneur knowing that this equilibrium will subsequently occur. With a second group of investors who have no monitoring rights, we analyse a truth telling contract and a misrepresentation contract in which cheating and monitoring probabilities are chosen in a similar way to those of the single investor contract. The non monitoring investors learn the results of any monitoring for free. Our main results are that: the two investor group truth-telling contract achieves the second best despite the lack of commitment; this contract is only feasible under limited liability of investors if low state revenues are high enough. When low state revenues are too low for this then the two investor misrepresentation contract is optimal. This contract has a negative correlation between repayments to the two investor groups: the contract uses the non-monitoring group to smooth out the repayments of the entrepreneur optimally. This reduces his incentive to make false reports and mitigates the investor's incentive to monitor. A second result is that the two investor scenario is Pareto superior to the single investor model. We show that with unlimited liability on investor groups, the two investor misrepresentation contract is as good as the second best. Generally in this misrepresentation contract investors may have to make repayments to the firm rather than receive them. A further result is that the three party contract is always renegotiation-proof, as well as collusion-proof so long as the low state revenues are below the expected repayments of the monitor. Last we show that under limited liability the share of finance provided by the two is strictly positive and uniquely determined.financial contracts; multiple investors; no commitment.

Truth-telling and the Role of Limited Liability in Costly State Verification Loan Contracts

Recent literature has considered the form of loan contract between two or more risk neutral parties where the revelation principle is inappropriate due to the lack of commitment to an auditing policy by the lender. The privately informed debtor has a stochastic return; once he knows the state realisation, auditing and cheating are determined as Nash equilibria. The literature assumes that this leads to randomised cheating and auditing. In this paper we verify that the contract may involve this randomisation; but that it may also involve truthtelling with random auditing and one or more investors in line with Persons (1996); or a single state independent repayment with no auditing. We define conditions on the state observation cost and the distribution of returns which determine which of these three forms of contract is optimal. We find that under unlimited liability when the loan size is fixed the two investor truthtelling contract dominates all the other forms; and that this is also true when the loan size is optimally chosen. On the other hand under limited liability if the cost of observation is large relative to the lowest state revenue, the random auditing contract or a constrained two investor truthtelling contract may be optimal. The limited liability condition in the constrained truthtelling contracts forces the level of finance to be higher than under unlimited liability.loan contracts, costly state verification, commitment, limited liability

On Corruption and Institutions in Decentralized Eco

This paper presents a model of opportunistic behaviour in decentralized economic exchange and considers the impact of inadequate institutional framework of formal contract enforcement on economic performance. It is shown that (i) when the number of cheating traders is sufficiently large, inadequate institutions result in a loss of decentralized trading contracts, (ii) an adequate institutional framework, while being necessary for the attainment of a Pareto optimal outcome, may not be sufficient if traders perceive it as inadequate; and (iii) sufficiently good formal enforcement provisions help deter contractual breach in enviroments with corrupt and powerful enforcers.Formal contract enforcement; perceptions; transition economies