Broken Promises: An Experiment

Gary Charness and Martin Dufwenberg

University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

Abstract: We test whether promises per se are effective in enhancing cooperative behavior in a form of trust game. In a new treatment, rather than permitting free-form messages, we instead allow only a bare promise-only message to be sent (or not). We find that bare promises are much less effective in achieving good social outcomes than free-form messages; in fact, bare promise-only messages lead to behavior that is much the same as when no messages are feasible. Our design also permits us to test the predictions of guilt aversion against the predictions of lying aversion. Our experimental results provide evidence that mainly supports the guilt-aversion predictions, but we also find some support for the presence of lying aversion.

Keywords: Behavioral economics; cheap talk; communication; cost-of-lying; credibility; guilt aversion; psychological game theory; promises (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-08-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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