Dishonesty as a Collective-Risk Social Dilemma

Shuguang Jiang and Marie Claire Villeval
Additional contact information
Shuguang Jiang: Shandong University

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We study cheating as a collective-risk social dilemma in a group setting in which individuals are asked to report their actual outcomes. Misreporting their outcomes increases the individual's earnings but when the sum of claims in the group reaches a certain threshold, a risk of collective sanction affects all the group members, regardless of their individual behavior. Because of the pursuit of selfish interest and a lack of coordination with other group members, the vast majority of individuals eventually earn less than the reservation payoff from honest reporting in the group. Over time, most groups are trapped in a "Tragedy of Dishonesty", despite the presence of moral costs of lying. The risk of collective sanction is triggered less frequently in small groups than in large ones, while priming a collectivist mindset has little effect on lying.

Keywords: Dishonesty; Public Bad; Group Size; Collectivism; Individualism; Experiment; Dishonesty Public Bad Group Size Collectivism Individualism Experiment JEL Codes: C92 D01 D91 D62 H41; Experiment JEL Codes: C92; D01; D91; D62; H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-12-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03900919v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03900919v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Dishonesty as a collective‐risk social dilemma (2024)
Working Paper: Dishonesty as a collective‐risk social dilemma (2023)
Working Paper: Dishonesty as a Collective-Risk Social Dilemma (2022)
Working Paper: Dishonesty as a Collective-Risk Social Dilemma (2022)
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:hal:wpaper:hal-03900919

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().