Lying for others: The impact of agency on misreporting (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lying through others: Does delegation promote deception?
Journal of Economic Psychology, 2019
How do agency relationships affect an individual's willingness to lie for monetary advantage? Does lie aversion decline if a lie (or truth) is sent through an agent, rather than sent directly by the individual? In a recent paper, Erat (2013) shows that a significant proportion of his subjects prefer to delegate a deception decision. We present experiments designed to focus on one of several possible explanations for this intriguing behavior-that delegation reduces lie aversion. The experiments reveal that subjects are more willing to lie through a delegate than to lie directly despite controlling for potential effects of delegated decision-making on preferences over payoffs, probabilities of actions, and/or the desire to avoid taking a decision.
Representative evidence on lying costs
Journal of Public Economics, 2014
A central assumption in economics is that people misreport their private information if this is to their material benefit. Several recent models depart from this assumption and posit that some people do not lie or at least do not lie maximally. These models invoke many different underlying motives including intrinsic lying costs, altruism, efficiency concerns, or conditional cooperation. To provide an empiricallyvalidated microfoundation for these models, it is crucial to understand the relevance of the different potential motives. We measure the extent of lying costs among a representative sample of the German population by calling them at home. In our setup, participants have a clear monetary incentive to misreport, misreporting cannot be detected, reputational concerns are negligible and altruism, efficiency concerns or conditional cooperation cannot play a role. Yet, we find that aggregate reporting behavior is close to the expected truthful distribution suggesting that lying costs are large and widespread. Further lab experiments show that this result is not driven by the mode of communication.
Sse Efi Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance, 2007
We experimentally investigate the effect of cheap talk in a bargaining game with one-sided asymmetric information. A seller has private information about his or her skill and is provided an opportunity to communicate this information to a buyer through a written message. Four different treatments are compared; one without communication, one with free-form communication, and two treatments with pre-specified communication in the form of promises of varying strength. Our results suggest that lying about private information is costly and that the cost of lying increases with the size of the lie and the strength of the promise. Freely formulated messages lead to the fewest lies and the most efficient outcomes.
Economic and Intrinsic Motivations for Dishonesty: An Experimental Study
2011
We report results from an experiment that investigates truthfulness in self-reporting under different reporting regimes. The experiment involves a production task with self-reporting of accidents, with reporting compulsory for some participants, but only voluntary for others. We find that dishonesty is prevalent, but accident reporting is more frequent with compulsory reporting compared with voluntary. This suggests that lie aversion is a stronger force than the intrinsic motivation to voluntarily report, and that careful design of self-reporting regimes is necessary by enforcement agencies to achieve satisfactory compliance outcomes. Our results are relevant for several areas beyond regulatory compliance, including dishonesty in social security claims, insurance claims, workplace expense claims, income tax returns, and financial reporting.
Experimental Evidence on Deceitful Communication: Does Everyone Have a Price?
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
This paper introduces a new task to elicit individual aversion to deceiving, based on a modi…ed version of the Deception Game as presented in Gneezy (Am. Econ. Rev. 95 (1): 384-395: 2005). A multipleprice-list mechanism is used to determine the deception premium asked by an individual to switch from faithful to deceitful communication. The results show that, depending on payo¤s, 71% of the subjects will switch at most once. Among them, 40% appear to be either "ethical" or "spiteful". The other 60% respond to incentives in line with the cost of lying theory; they will forego faithful communication if the bene…t from deceiving the other is large enough. Regression analysis shows that this deception premium is independent of the risk aversion and social preferences of the subject; it would thus capture an inner preference for behaving well.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
People try to avoid appearing dishonest. Although efforts to avoid appearing dishonest can often reduce lying, we argue that, at times, the desire to appear honest can actually lead people to lie. We hypothesize that people may lie to appear honest in cases where the truth is highly favorable to them, such that telling the truth might make them appear dishonest to others. A series of studies provided robust evidence for our hypothesis. Lawyers, university students, and MTurk and Prolific participants said that they would have underreported extremely favorable outcomes in real-world scenarios (Studies 1a-1d). They did so to avoid appearing dishonest. Furthermore, in a novel behavioral paradigm involving a chance game with monetary prizes, participants who received in private a very large number of wins reported fewer wins than they received; they lied and incurred a monetary cost to avoid looking like liars (Studies 2a-2c). Finally, we show that people's concern that others would think that they have overreported is valid (Studies 3a-3b). We discuss our findings in relation to the literatures on dishonesty and on reputation.
Nobody likes a rat: On the willingness to report lies and the consequences thereof
We investigate the intrinsic motivation of individuals to report, and thereby sanction, fellow group members who lie for personal gain. We further explore the changes in lying and reporting behavior that result from giving individuals a say in who joins their group. We find that enough individuals are willing to report lies such that in fixed groups lying is unprofitable. However, we also find that when groups can select their members, individuals who report lies are generally shunned, even by groups where lying is absent. This facilitates the formation of dishonest groups where lying is prevalent and reporting is nonexistent.
Deceitful Communication in a Sender-Receiver Experiment: Does Everyone Have a Price?
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2019
This paper introduces a new task to elicit individual aversion to deceiving, based on a modi…ed version of the Deception Game as presented in Gneezy (Am. Econ. Rev. 95 (1): 384-395: 2005). A multipleprice-list mechanism is used to determine the deception premium asked by an individual to switch from faithful to deceitful communication. The results show that, depending on payo¤s, 71% of the subjects will switch at most once. Among them, 40% appear to be either "ethical" or "spiteful". The other 60% respond to incentives in line with the cost of lying theory; they will forego faithful communication if the bene…t from deceiving the other is large enough. Regression analysis shows that this deception premium is independent of the risk aversion and social preferences of the subject; it would thus capture an inner preference for behaving well.
This paper studies lying in a novel context. Previous work has focused on situations in which people are either fully aware of the economic consequences of all available actions (e.g., die-under-cup paradigm), or they are uncertain, but this uncertainty cannot be cleared in any way (e.g., sender-receiver game). On the contrary, in reality, people oftentimes know that they will have a chance to lie, they are initially uncertain about the economic consequences of the available actions, but they can invest resources (e.g., time) to find them out. Here we capture the essence of this type of situations by means of a novel decision problem. Two experiments provide evidence of four empirical regularities regarding the distribution of choices, and suggest that participants vary along two dimensions: the moral cost of lying, and the cost of investing time to find out the payoffs associated to the available actions. Taking inspiration from these observations, we introduce a model that is cons...
Ethical Manoeuvring: Why People Avoid Both Major and Minor Lies
British Journal of Management, 2011
This research examines whether and why people manoeuvre their unethical behaviour so as to maximize material gains at a minimal psychological cost. Employing an anonymous die-under-cup paradigm, we asked people to report the outcome of a private die roll and gain money as a function of their reports. Supporting self-concept maintenance theory, results showed that people avoid both major lies (i.e. over-reporting the highest possible outcome) and minor lies (yielding little material gain), but did overreport intermediate outcomes when this implied a substantial increase compared to a walk-away value. Results suggest that lying is psychologically costly. We propose that organizations allowing freedom of choice while narrowing the available ways to unethically boost personal profit should see a decrease in unethical behaviour among their employees.