We find that corruption rises significantly when public goods become cheaper, yet citizens’ willingness to punish it does not move with the business cycle at all. We show that these facts share a single mechanism. Citizens punish on attribution: the posterior probability that a shortfall in provision is the politician’s doing, a scale-free statistic that cannot track the cost of public goods. Politicians restrain themselves against levels: an absolute standard of adequate provision. Cheapness is permissive because it lets the same diversion leave a respectable amount behind, not because citizens grow lenient. We test this in a laboratory experiment with nearly 800 participants, in which the cost of provision is announced to both parties, and a transfer of uncertain size randomizes the clarity of responsibility. Punishment is a precise null across cost states, but roughly triples once the politician’s choice becomes inferable, holding the citizen’s earnings and the punishment technology fixed. Prior beliefs move punishment exactly where Bayesian updating implies they cannot, and leave it unmoved where it implies they must, identifying accountability as expectation-referenced rather than belief-updated. Elicited priors are themselves more optimistic when public goods are cheap, the opposite direction to actual corruption. Lastly, the model implies that accountability is non-monotone in the clarity of fiscal responsibility: highest under full transparency and lowest under full opacity. 

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