LIES IN DISGUISE-AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON CHEATING
Abstract
We present a novel experimental design to measure honesty and lying. Participants receive a die which they roll privately. Since their payoff depends on the reported roll of the die, the subjects have an incentive to be dishonest and report higher numbers to get a higher payoff. This design has three advantages. First, cheating cannot be detected on the individual level, which reduces potential demand effects. Second, the method is very easy to implement. Third, the underlying true distribution of the outcome under full honesty is known, and hence it is possible to test different theoretical predictions. We find that about 20% of inexperienced subjects lie to the fullest extent possible while 39% of subjects are fully honest. In addition, a high share of subjects consists of partial liars; these subjects lie, but do not report the payoff-maximizing draw. We discuss different motives that explain the observed behavioral pattern.
Cite this
Urs Fischbacher, Franziska Föllmi-Heusi (2013). LIES IN DISGUISE-AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON CHEATING. Journal of the European Economic Association. https://doi.org/10.1111/jeea.12014
@article{urs2013lies,
title = {LIES IN DISGUISE-AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON CHEATING},
author = {Fischbacher, Urs and Föllmi-Heusi, Franziska},
year = {2013},
journal = {Journal of the European Economic Association},
doi = {10.1111/jeea.12014}
}Citations in this library
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1,243 citations exist upstream.