Representative evidence on lying costs

By Johannes Abeler, Anke Becker, Armin Falk. 2014

332 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 empirically-validated 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.

Subfields: General Decision Sciences, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ae93a18c9f1bc4f167c2a399a7377fb67ccfc6e

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Citations in the corpus

Laboratory Measure of Cheating Predicts School Misconduct (2018, unknown): “The fact that these correlations emerge from independent studies that use different methods and subject pools is reassuring for the usefulness of laboratory measures of behaviour, especially cheating behaviour, as cheating has been conjectured to be more context-sensitive than other types of behavio”
Preferences for Truth‐Telling (2016, methodology): “…in the meta study Study # treatments # subjects Country Randomization method True distribution this study * 7 1124 United Kingdom multiple multiple Abeler et al. 2014 * 4 1102 Germany coin toss multiple Abeler 2015 * 1 60 China draw from urn 1D10 Abeler and Nosenzo 2015 * 3 507 Germany draw from…”
Why Do We Lie? A Practical Guide To The Dishonesty Literature (2018, methodology): “This has either been done by recruiting and running the study online or by directly contacting people, for example, calling them at home (Abeler et al., 2014) or running the experiment in a public place (Jacobsen and Piovesan, 2016). It is easy to ask people to perform the classic off-screen coin-to”
Let’s be honest: A review of experimental evidence of honesty and truth-telling (2014, background): “Abeler et al. (2014) anomalously found that, even under conditions of total anonymity, 55% of subjects flipping the coin over the telephone actually reported the outcome associated with a zero monetary reward, forfeiting €15, which they attribute to privacy concerns (the need for winners to…”
The Dynamics of Motivated Beliefs (2020, background): “Furthermore, one might worry that by stating “I don’t recall”, subjects are merely revealing a preference for truth-telling (see e.g., Gneezy, 2005; Fischbacher and Heusi, 2013; Abeler et al., 2014).”
Gender Differences in Honesty: Groups Versus Individuals (2015, background): “…2012; Houser, Vetter, and Winter, 2012; Conrads, Irlenbusch, Rilke, and Walkowitz, 2013; Conrads, Irlenbusch, Rilke, Schielke, and Walkowitz, 2014; Abeler, Becker, and Falk, 2014).1 So far, the literature on lying behavior has mainly analyzed decisions by individuals; possibly in strategic…”
Language and Consumer Dishonesty: A Self-Diagnosticity Theory (2021, background): “Previous research shows that people prefer telling the truth in the coin-toss task (Abeler, Becker, and Falk 2014), suggesting that in this task lying is diagnostic of dishonesty and thus appropriate for testing our hypothesis.”