 Lying aversion and vague communication: An experimental studyKeh-Kuan Sun and Stella Papadokonstantaki European Economic Review, 2023, vol. 160, issue C Abstract: An agent may strategically employ a vague message to mislead an audience’s belief about the state of the world, but this may cause the agent to feel guilt or negatively impact how the audience perceives the agent. Using a novel experimental design that allows participants to be vague while at the same time isolating the internal cost of lying from the social identity cost of appearing dishonest, we explore the extent to which these two types of lying costs affect communication. We find that participants exploit vagueness to be consistent with the truth, while at the same time leveraging the imprecision to their own benefit. More participants use vague messages in treatments where concern with social identity is relevant. In addition, we find that social identity concerns substantially affect the length and patterns of vague messages used across the treatments. Keywords: Lying; Vagueness; Communication; Experiments; Behavioral economics (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:160:y:2023:i:c:s0014292123002398 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2023.104611 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.