Believing in Others’ Dishonesty: An Experimental Study on Beliefs about Lying

Silvia Lübbecke ()
Additional contact information
Silvia Lübbecke: University of Paderborn

No 32, Working Papers Dissertations from Paderborn University, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics

Abstract: Several experiments provide evidence for discriminating behavior towards the out-group—even in settings where group division is arbitrary. This paper studies whether discriminatory behavior can be traced back to subjects holding discriminating beliefs. An experiment is presented where subjects are randomly assigned to minimal groups. First, subjects are asked to draw a marble in private and report whether it is white or speckled. Second, their beliefs are elicited about how many of the others in the respective group have reported the payoff-maximizing speckled marble. Data show that subjects expect others to behave dishonestly in general, but do not differ in their beliefs about the behavior of in- and out-group members. Further, the results indicate that subjects’ beliefs about others’ honesty are positively correlated with the individual lying behavior. Subjects who report the profit-maximizing type also believe in significantly more payoff-maximizing reports by others compared to those subjects who report the unfavorable outcome.

Keywords: Group identity; Minimal groups; Intergroup discrimination; Incentivized belief elicitation; Experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 D82 D83 D91 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2018-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm and nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://groups.uni-paderborn.de/wp-wiwi/RePEc/pdf/dispap/DP32.pdf (application/pdf)

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:pdn:dispap:32

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Dissertations from Paderborn University, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WP-WiWi-Info ().