Would you lie about your mother's birthday? A new online dishonesty experiment
Victor von Loessl,
Christoph Bühren,
Björn Frank,
Heike Wetzel and
Elina Wiederhold
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2024, vol. 109, issue C
Abstract:
We ask a representative sample of German household decision-makers to enter their mother's birthday, with potential payments depending on the month and the day they state. Thus, we create an incentive to lie. Compared to the die-under-the-cup experiment, our alternative has a lower probability that the income-maximizing outcome is true. Furthermore, it is better suited for online surveys and samples in which gambling is socially stigmatized. We conduct different variations of this game to crystalize design recommendations for researchers interested in our tool. Participants lied to receive higher payoffs, but only with real monetary incentives and only to a relatively small extent. Our results are largely insensitive to several design elements that we vary, such as the probability of being paid and the magnitude of the payoffs.
Keywords: Dishonesty; Lying; Survey experiment; Die-under-the-cup alternative (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C99 D63 D91 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804324000314
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:109:y:2024:i:c:s2214804324000314
DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2024.102191
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza
More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().