Disguising Lies—Image Concerns and Partial Lying in Cheating Games

By Kiryl Khalmetski, Dirk Sliwka. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2019

102 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study equilibrium reporting behavior in cheating games when agents have a fixed cost of lying and image concerns not to be perceived as a liar. We show that equilibria naturally arise in which agents with low costs of lying randomize among a set of the highest potential reports. Such equilibria induce a distribution of reports in line with observed experimental patterns. We also find that higher image concerns lead to an increase in the range of reported lies, while the effect of the fixed cost of lying is the opposite. (JEL C72, D82, Z13)

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c024174eafd6905364402258447481b78ea8a23

Citations in the corpus

• Preferences for Truth‐Telling (2016, unknown): “In concurrent work, Khalmetski and Sliwka (2016) discuss a similar utility function, combining a fixed cost of lying with concerns for reputation.”